Aretha's Hat: Inauguration Day, 2009 (Paperback)

Description

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."