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Both are long non-metrical list poems with very similar line starts.
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I'd agree - the similarity is in the structure and the visceral/imagistic quality of the language, but it didn't read like any type of homage to me, or at least any more than sonnets about love are homages to sonnets about love.
Maybe it's context - some types of structure have been so embedded in a sense of what 'poetry' is that using them ceases to be a homage and is simply a way of placing an idea in a format. Others have not, but are waiting in the wings to becoming forms/types/armatures to write within (having said that, a list poem is fairly established form, I'd have thought).
In terms of words/text working without references, I think perhaps the best poems - the really fantastically transformative ones, from my perspective, are the ones that work as a multiplicity of simultaneous storytellings - so if they're allusive and the reader 'gets' the allusion then that's great, but they also work to communicate an idea without needing to know the allusion - the allusion is just one tiny ingredient amongst many in the poem.
And readers tend to like to prove their worth as readers, too - power and agency and all that. And critics tend to like to prove their worth as critics, so if they're feeling insecure will divert to high-sounding opacities of language. And ultimately maybe reading is just about a dialogue between reader, text, and context, and the meanings shift/change depending on a multiplicity of things that will, of course, refer to other previous things because that's part of the context of both reading and making.
Too many words. Sorry.
Sarah-Jane