East Lyme — It began innocently enough, a means for father and son to correspond during sonny's college days, admittedly beyond cursory texting:

"Yo, dad. How bout them Giants? You need to send money again."

Oh, those Ostrowskis of Niantic. Wordsmiths, all. Like Steve, the dad, an 18-year college professor of English, and Ben, the son, a Brown-educated 23-year-old PhD candidate, both of whom who can make words sing, dance, sway, flutter and boogie.

Their idea — correspond via poetry — has turned into a collaborative book of poems, "Penultimate Human Constellation," drawing five-star reviews on Amazon.

"We just wanted to stay in contact," Steve Ostrowski was saying from his living room over the weekend, sitting in front of a fire with Ben and the family dog, Eli, named after No. 10 of the New York Giants.

Inhabitants of this corner of the world may know Steve Ostrowski better as "Dev's dad." Dev Ostrowski is among the state's best high school basketball players and happens to be Da Man right now at East Lyme High.

Ah, but Steve is actually a published author and English professor at Central Connecticut.

"I wrote the first poem and I said to Ben, 'let's do this and see what happens,'" he said. "The initial impulse was to write a poem and have Ben write a response. Then it just snowballed. We weren't writing for publication when we started. It was an exchange."

Steve Ostrowski said it was a Sunday night when he reached out on Facebook to gauge publishing possibilities. A primer on book publishing: Good luck to ya. And yet the next morning, Arizona-based Tolsun Books was aboard.

Ben, who played three sports at East Lyme and wrote for the Saga, the outstanding school newspaper, attends Carnegie Mellon in its PhD program. He's studying organizational behavior, melding psychology, sociology and economics and how they're applied to business and organizational settings.

Aside from their biological bond, father and son share the same poetic muse: music.

Steve: "It was from listening to Bob Dylan through my older brother's bedroom door. I would hear Neil Young, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, but when I heard Dylan, I thought 'you can write music with words like that?' My intro to poetry was through the mystical nature of Dylan's lyrics.

"The very first song I ever heard was 'A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall.' I was probably nine. I think I must have been born with a quirky sense of what counts as interesting writing. Dylan taught me you can say more with words in song than 'I wanna hold your hand.' You could really go pretty deep with words. The music was the same three chords. But it was the words."

Ben: "I got it from hip hop. Rappers are poets most times. How they turn a phrase. Their cleverness. Their rhythm. The first person I ever listened to was Eminem. That's a typical entry way for other kids my age. I think that happened to a lot of my friends who are deeper into it now. Especially for white kids, Eminem becomes the gateway. His attention to each individual word. All of a sudden you see the magic in the words. Now for me, it's Kendrick Lamar and (female rapper) Noname. Poetry became an outlet."

Dylan and Eminem, who on the surface (actually on the surface on the sides and at the bottom) seem to share very little, might actually help the rest of us comprehend poetry a little better. Let's face it: It's esoteric, at best. But then, we all know song lyrics, right?

"Right from the second poem, Ben started picking up on phrases I used. It became a kind of dance," Steve Ostrowski said. "Themes emerged. Plays on words. Picking up on each other's mannerisms. In poetry, anything goes if you can get away with it. You can't really do that in prose."

Penultimate Human Constellation is more than father and son admiring each other in print. This is not the Ostrowskis' first rodeo turning phrases.

"It's not like he's the old sage, like I'm asking questions and he's answering them," Ben said.

Steve: "Ben is going through some angst in his poems because of college and the pressure. I'm just trying to negotiate growing older and trying to be a good father."

Now they have a book that will bind them for the rest of their lives. It's available on Amazon and through Tolsun Books.

And if the book does well enough, Ben won't have to text dad, asking for money.

Now that's pure poetry.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro