Contemporary American poet Mark Irwin’s narrative poem “My Father’s Hats” explores how memory, imagination, and knowledge shift over a person’s life.

Published in 2000 by the New Letters literary magazine, “My Father’s Hats” acts as an elegy, a poetic mode used to mourn the dead or lament serious issues for a father. Irwin contrasts the certainty of childhood with the uncertainty of adulthood. A child can immerse himself in his imagination, thinking, “I was in a forest,” while exploring his father’s closet (Line 6). However, his adult self’s reservations and worries make him wary of it [“on water I’m not sure is there”] (Line 19). The poem later appeared in Irwin’s poetry collection Bright Hunger (2004).

Through juxtaposition, Irwin delves into the paradox that acquiring knowledge creates more uncertainty about the future than ignorance. The poem also reveals that seeing a parent as a person means leaving childhood behind and worrying about them. Irwin quotes Melville that “Truth, uncompromisingly told, will always have ragged edges” in a 2008 American Poetry Review article. Knowledge’s price leaves emotional wounds.

Poet Biography

Born in 1953 in Minnesota, acclaimed American poet Mark Irwin began his writing career as a child: “When I was twelve years old, I accidentally shot a robin, high in a tree, with a BB gun,” he told The Massachusetts Review literary magazine in 2018. “I think that I wrote something trying to understand how this happened.”

Through this exercise, Irwin realized that writing was “a way of thinking and feeling.” Lived experience, perception, and nature continue to shape his writing. Since attaining his MFA at the famed University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1980 and English Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University in 1982, Irwin has written 10 original poetry collections, an essay collection about poetic craft, and two translated books. Irwin currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.

He states that a poet’s worldview gives a poem its resonance and staying power for readers. Communication, then, plays a reoccurring role in his works. Irwin often contrasts technological development’s impact on relationships with the “wilderness within” (Post, Stephen G., et al. "Briefly Noted." CrossCurrents, vol. 47, no. 1, Wiley, 1997, pp. 134-37). Irwin also frequently discusses how the idea of truth manifests and distorts when expressed through the written word.

He wrote the poetry collections, A Passion According to Green (2017), American Urn: New & Selected Poems [1987­–2013] (2015), Large White House Speaking (2013), Tall If (2008), Bright Hunger (2004), White City (2000), Quick, Now, Always (1996), Against the Meanwhile: 3 Elegies (1988), and The Halo of Desire (1987). He won the 2018 Fresno State University Phillip Levin Prize for Poetry, which published his collection Shimmer in 2020. White City and Bright Hunger earned the Colorado Book Award for Poetry in 2001 and 2005. Irwin received the USC Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award for Tall If in 2010.

His other accolades include four Pushcart Prizes, a James Wright Poetry Award, a Nation/Discovery Award, a Mellon Mentoring Award for Graduate Students, and fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and Fulbright.

Irwin currently lives in Los Angeles and Colorado.

Poem Text

Irwin, Mark. "My Father’s Hats." 2000. US Library of Congress.

Summary

“My Father’s Hats” begins with the speaker remembering his habit of exploring his father’s “dark closet” on Sunday mornings (Lines 1-2).

Tiptoeing on a chair, he would “reach high” and touch his father’s hats (Lines 1-5). When feeling “the soft crowns,” he would “imagine / I was in a forest” (Lines 5-6). He envisions the forest as windy pines and “damp earth,” musky from rain (Lines 7-8). He associates the musky scent with his father (Lines 7-12). The speaker thinks how that scent lingered on the hats’ “bands, leather, and the inner silk / crowns” (Lines 9-10).

Thanks to the smell of his father’s hair, the speaker feels like he “was being held, or climbing a tree, touching” its “yellow fruit” (Lines 11-14). The leaves smell like a clove, reminding the speaker of the present moment, where his father sleeps (Lines 14-17). The speaker reflects on “his fabulous sleep,” the “his” implicitly his father since the father is the only other identified human in the piece (Lines 16-17).

While there is a holy, “godsome” presence in the air, the speaker’s tone expresses uncertainty (Lines 15-16). He feels he stands on a “canyon floor,” watching the light diminish “on water” he is “not sure is there” (Lines 17-19).