Aretha's Hat: Inauguration Day 2009 is a unique collaboration between two poets who have been friends since meeting at a workshop with A. R. Ammons thirty-one years ago. After hearing Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day," on January 20, they decided to write their own Praise Songs, beginning with an American Indian inspired "sky chant."

Over the next two months they emailed poems back and forth, letting each poem prompt the next from the poet receiving it. Ranging from sky to rocks to quilts, aging, and basketball, Kathryn Byer and Penelope Scambly Schott show how the leap and dance of poetry can capture not only the spirit of one special day but also the voice of one individual life in dialogue with another. They take as guides Ted Kooser's and Jim Harrison' collaboration, Braided Creek, in which neither poet claims credit for individual poems, saying, "This book is an assertion in favor of poetry and against credentials."