My Father's Hats

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.