What are poets really after?

Helena Nelson considers the pros and cons of the ‘after’ epigraph, poetry’s exclusive codes, and the necessary art of bluffing.

The Friday Poem is on holiday for August but here’s a lovely post from our Archive.

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For some years I’ve been observing that interesting phenomenon, the ‘after’ epigraph. An ‘after’, as you may know, comes before a poem. Once upon a time nobody used ‘after’ epigraphs, although they did dedications (‘for’) and sometimes honoured the dead (‘i.m. or in memoriam’). Many poets liked prefatory quotations too.

I’m not sure when ‘aftering’ began. T S Eliot doesn’t do it (so far as I can see). Larkin and Plath, from a swift flick through their Completes, don’t use ‘after’. Ted Hughes, in Birthday Letters 1998, has no ‘after’ poems, though some of the contents are definitely ‘after’ Plath. The Forward Book of Poetry 2001 contains no ‘after’ poems. However, Don Paterson ‘aftered’ four times in Nil Nil (his debut collection) 1993 and has been doing it ever since.

I don’t remember seeing ‘after’ as an epigraph to a novel or a short story. I’ve never seen an artwork titled ‘after’ another artist, or a movie ‘after’ another film director. It appears that ‘After’ is exclusively poetry code, one of the secret signs you learn when you join the poetry cabal.

An epigraph, according to Merriam Webster, is “a quotation set at the beginning of a literary work or one of its divisions to suggest its theme”. But ‘after’ at the start of a poem is not a quotation and may have nothing to do with the theme. (If there is a theme.) And it can mean many things. Over time most readers work the options out. Alternatively, we pretend we understand. Survival in the poetry business involves a lot of bluffing.

An ‘after’ at the start of a poem … can mean many things. Over time most readers work the options out. Alternatively, we pretend we understand. Survival in the poetry business involves a lot of bluffing

For example, if a poem titled ‘The Pond’ had an epigraph that read After Paul Klee, and you happened to know that Klee was a twentieth-century artist, and you happened to know what some of his most famous artworks looked like, the reference to Paul Klee might help you make sense of the poem. Or not. You might have to pretend you sort of knew about Klee. (Yeah right, that Klee.) The inference is that you need to be cultured in all the arts to read poetry. Alternatively, if the epigraph read After Paul Klee’s ‘The Goldfish’, and the poem happened to be about a pond containing a magical fish, you might find the reference helpful. You could even google “Klee” + “The Goldfish”. That way the poem would have an illustration. All you’d need is access to the net and a lively sense of curiosity.

Poets who write ekphrastic poems habitually reference the artwork they’re describing, or that they’re inspired by, with an ‘after’ statement. Often (but by no means always) you need to see the artwork to make sense of the poem. If you don’t need to see the artwork for the poem to work, is an ‘after’ necessary? Your call.

But it’s not just artwork. Many poems are ‘after’ other poets, in one sense or another. Sometimes the ‘after’ statement might simply say ‘After Caroline Bird’ or ‘After Emily Berry’. (You, the reader, are not supposed to say ‘Caroline who?’) So much depends on what you’re already supposed to know, or pretend you know. Not only should you know Berry and Bird are contemporary poets, you’re supposed to know which of their poems (or which aspects of their style) the poet had in mind. If you’re lucky, there may be a clue – for example, the title of the ‘after’ poem may be the same as the title of the ‘before’ poem. And the ‘before’ poem may be googlable. Or not.

Speaking as one who has spent many hours treasure-hunting ‘after’ references, I’d say it’s mainly easy and often fun to find them. I can be post-modern – in moderation. However, sometimes I stomp round my poetry bookshelves growling. A poem prefaced After Simon Spoon-Turner doesn’t tell me whether Spoon-Turner is a poet, an artist, a politician, a personal friend, an alter ego, dead or alive. If googling turns up diddlysquat, what was the ‘after’ for? Shouldn’t poets ask themselves whom their ‘after’ references help? Is something vital to the poem explained by the reference? Ok, good. But should the reader have to look up references before reading the poem? More to the point, will they?

Speaking as one who has spent many hours treasure-hunting ‘after’ references, I’d say it’s mainly easy and often fun to find them … However, sometimes I stomp round my poetry bookshelves growling

Sometimes I suspect the ‘after’ epigraph is there to impress (especially if the ‘aftered’ poet is someone nobody understands). Or it may be a matter of private understanding between the poet and a friend. Recently I saw a poem ‘after’ a tweet to someone I don’t know from someone I don’t know, while another poem was ‘after’ an inaccessible Chinese film. Grrrrrr.

Anyway, what sort of poetry club encourages an ‘after’ reference that only fans will find funny (e.g. Don Paterson writing after Ladislav Skala, when only those in-the-know know Skala is a Paterson pseudonym)? And speaking of Paterson, he often uses ‘after’ for loose translations (he calls them ‘versions’) of well-known Spanish, Italian or German originals. In this case, the ‘after’ will reference the author, e.g. Bertholt Brecht, Eugenio Montale, but not the original poem. Either you’re supposed just to know which famous poem you’re reading Paterson’s version of, or you have trot off to find out (it’s an education). Contemporary poets like making their readers work. Often, when I commence tracking down an ‘after’, the name is totally unknown to me. At such times, I feel sadly lacking. The poem is meant for readers who do recognise the reference. Isn’t that right?

Today’s poetry workshops often use poems as prompts. All the participants write something inspired by, say, an Ian MacMillan piece. One of those attendees later gets the resulting poem published, and if some resemblance to the original remains (or even if it doesn’t), they put ‘after Ian MacMillan’ under the title. Nobody wants to be accused of plagiarism.

It’s undeniable that an ‘after’ epigraph always means something. But only the poet who put it there knows precisely what. It’s a password. The reader’s job is to crack it.

My favourite example of the after aftermath (so far) is in Tim Tim Cheng’s pamphlet Tapping At Glass. Here, ‘Ars Poetica with Translations’ is After Alycia Pirmohamed. (Anybody’s ‘Ars Poetica’ is also ‘after’ Horace, probably via Archibald McLeish, but that’s by the by.) On this occasion, I was lucky. I already knew Pirmohamed was a poet (I’ve met her, I’ve got her pamphlet, I’ve got her book). But which poem? I’m quite old, so first I looked in the book. No ‘Ars Poetica’. Bum.

I therefore googled “Alycia Pirmohamed” + “Ars Poetica”, which took me to two poems in Granta. Bingo! I swiftly scanned ‘Art Poetic with Footnotes’. Now I could see that Cheng’s ‘Ars Poetica with Translations’ was a playful allusion to that poem. I could also see how Cheng moves Pirmohamed’s ‘permanence’ discussion into the issue of ‘object permanence’. It occurred to me that Cheng perhaps knew Pirmohamed personally. Maybe her ‘after’ was also a bit of peer-poet banter?

But the unexpected bonus (and nerdy delight) was the discovery that Alycia Pirmohamed’s poem was also ‘after’ another piece of writing. This time the poem is After Dionne Brand. Dionne Brand was a familiar name to me, but I hadn’t read her. Novelist or poet? A Google search yielded The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos. Alycia Pirmohamed’s ‘Ars P.’ was clearly ‘after’ a whole book of prose poems. There are further clues inside the Pirmohamed poem, which begins:

The poet says she longs for permanence.
In the footnote, she finds a line in the shape of a warbler.
In the footnote, she plies apart the axis of her sexuality.

Oh how I would love to take a look at The Blue Clerk. But it’s an American publication, costly and not available online, though there are extracts on the Griffin Prize website (none of which mention warblers and none of which have footnotes). I wondered whether Alycia P. owned The Blue Clerk, or whether she was referring to the extract published in Granta. How unutterably gratified I should be if The Blue Clerk also had an ‘after’ epigraph! But alas, I have almost certainly reached what Russell Hoban, in The Mouse and His Child, calls “the last visible dog”.

Contemporary poetry, so far as I can see, professes accessibility but really continues to veil itself in codes. Terminology has always been useful for inviting some people in and keeping others out. On the other hand, every poem in existence owes something to poems that came before it. It’s a sort of relay race. One poet passes the baton to the next, and we are all in the same race. ‘After’ epigraphs would appear to make the debt explicit. But we poets can mean so many things by our ‘afters’! We so rarely say what we mean. I’ve heard it suggested that poetry is an abstruse ars. Well, er, yes.

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Helena Nelson is a poet, critic, and publisher, founding editor of HappenStance Press and Sphinx Review, and Consulting Editor at The Friday Poem. Her first collection, Starlight on Water (Rialto, 2003), was a Jerwood / Aldeburgh First Collection winner. Her second was Plot and Counterplot (Shoestring, 2010). She also writes and publishes light verse, including Down With Poetry! (HappenStance, 2016) and Branded (Red Squirrel, 2019). Her most recent collection is PEARLS: The Complete Mr & Mrs Philpott Poems (HappenStance, 2022).

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