I find the concept of literary borrowing really interesting so thought as well as borrowing from someone I'd make the poem about that act of borrowing. Eavan Boland's 'The Making of an Irish Goddess' is a poem I'm in love with (click) so that and also Joe Dunthorne's 'Workshop Dream' had profound influence.
The Making of a New Poem
Foucault went to hell
with no sense of time,
sealed in his own
reused metaphor.
Bentham, the bruised
architect in the next cell,
squints at the central tower,
walls of one height,
brick of a single colour;
measures the mirrored distance
of interminable light.
The place swells with them:
Borges, lost finally
at his finger's end,
a Braille Deadalus;
Kafka, skin frothed
by his own machine,
traces renewed scars:
an endless redrafting.
Each hermetic, finished
with no sense of time;
in the right place
on the right shelf:
an ordered, desired,
hell by design
I find myself borrowing.
But I need time -
my flesh and that history -
to make the same descent.
Language is the wound
we leave in the time we have
which in my case is this
September evening,
the aching sentences
tangled irrevocably
in a cold reusing:
a litany of borrowing.