S3, E4: "My Father's Hats" by Mark Irwin
This is the fourth episode of the Fatherhood series of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin.
Today's poem is "My Father's Hats" by Mark Irwin.
Listen to the episode
Context
Two things really spoke to me in this poem.
The role of smells and scents in transporting us across time and space, and
The hopefulness of the poet’s treatment and description of death
Taking those two in order.
First, the senses.
We are sensual beings. The mind and logic play such large parts in our decision-making and — in many ways, the objective quality of our lives, the notion that we are living fully, and contributing what we can, as part of a greater whole — a community, a society, that we are good citizens.
But so much of the individual quality of our lives is what we experience through our senses.
We are human animals, and our senses keep us alive, compel us to eat and drink and mate. We do not, literally cannot, I don’t think, experience beauty through logic. We experience beauty through sights and sounds and touch and feel. We experience deliciousness not through a detailed breakdown of underlying ingredients and how they interact. We experience deliciousness through taste.
The flip side — the razor’s edge we must walk — is that too much sensuality, living too much in thrall to our senses, can lead us down a dark path to hedonism and beyond. In many ways, periodic denial of the senses heightens the senses. When we seek it out a little less, we get so much more.
That relationship of touch and especially of scent is here in this short poem by Mark Irwin, the author of eleven collections of poetry and a professor in the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Southern California Dornsife.
Irwin said of this poem:
“When I was five or six years old, while my father was at church, I often crawled into his closet, stood on a stool, and tried on all of his hats, sometimes looking into and smelling the crowns. These moments remain in some odd way the most mysterious and unorthodoxly religious ones in my life. I wrote the first three or four lines while hiking in 1996. When my father died in 1998, I wrote the entire poem out in fifteen minutes.”
That line in the middle, as he has crawled into the closet and smelled the hat bands, the leather and the inner silk crowns:
where I would smell his
hair and almost think I was being
held
How powerful an image, a feeling, of the father-son bond is that?
That brings me to the second thing I took from this poem: the poet’s take on death.
This father-son bond existed through the senses and the spirit, not just in the physical connection, which I think is a really hopeful thing.
It means — and it clearly meant this for Mark Irwin, who wrote the poem when his father died — that this connection can continue to exist long after the bodily form is gone.
This connection, this bond, is spiritual but no less real, and may be even more real, and it is available to us when we open up our senses to it.
This hopefulness in the face of death is summed up so beautifully in those three words — “his fabulous sleep”.
Has there ever been a more gorgeous and a more hopeful description of death?
All of that makes this poem a perfect one for us to consider grief.
In an earlier episode of this series on fatherhood, I covered “The Living Years” by Mike Rutherford, of the rock group Mike and the Mechanics.
S3, E2: "The Living Years" by Mike Rutherford
That piece dwelt on the difference and the distance between the father and the son, a difference and a distance that could not be crossed in life, and that , absolutely, is a common experience.
Mark Irwin’s poem offers a different viewpoint. It says bond and connection need not be totally about understanding but merely about connection.
We don’t need to understand, we just need to open ourselves to the love that is always available, always in the ether, and always there, through sight and sound and touch and taste and the scents that are around us when we are present to them.
Poems on Fathers and Fatherhood
This is a poem from the Fatherhood series of Poems for the Speed of Life.
All the poems in this series will be about fathers or by fathers.
They will have something vital to show us about the experience, either of fatherhood itself, or of being a son or daughter of a father.
One of the poems was written in 1603, another in 1800, but most will be from the last 50 years or so. There will be a poem by a star of social media, there will be a poem that is actually a song lyric, and I also — and this is a first for me — will be including one of my own poems in this series, a poem I wrote last year about and for my daughter.
This series is for men who would like to be able to emulate their own fathers, and also for men who want to become the father they never had.
But it’s not just for men. Around 60% of the listeners to this podcast over the past 18 months have been women, and all the episodes in this series will be for women too. Because men need women and women need men. We need each other to sustain life, and we need each other to enjoy to the full the life we sustain. At our best, we each bring something different and essential.
So there can be doubt that there are lots of women out there who would like their men — their husbands or partners or the men they would like to meet, the men who are the fathers of their children now or might be in the future — to fully embody the role of father, in all its complexities and challenges and glories.
We all need fathers and father figures in our lives, and maybe now more than ever, with so much immaturity, short-term thinking and lack of leadership in the world. This series of poems will try to bring some of that inspiration and wisdom straight to you.
So thank you for being here. Please enjoy this series of Poems for the Speed of Life, and if you do, please share one episode with someone who might benefit from hearing it.
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