Mark Irwin states that his personal experience shapes and moves many of his poems. “I tend to accumulate experience for poems, often for years until I’m floored,” he stated in a 2016 interview with his alma mater Case Western Reserve.  

“My Father’s Hats” began as three to four lines Irwin wrote during a hike in 1996. He eventually used the lines in a poem memorializing his father two years later. “When my father died in 1998, I wrote the entire poem out in fifteen minutes,” Irwin recalled (Poets.org).

Irwin pulled the speaker’s Sunday treks into his father’s closet from adventures Irwin had at five to 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,” he elaborates (Poets.org).

The speaker does not try on any of the hats in the poem. However, Irwin states he and the speaker shared the habit of “smelling the crowns” (Poets.org).

Irwin transforms his childhood habit by adding images of the natural world, fueling the poem through “both recollection and imagining” (Wessels, Andrew. "Four Questions on Memorability." The Offending Adam).