Spirits Lifted at the Hawks On High Book Launch

Phil Fitzpatrick shared stories, poems and enthusiasm..

The weather couldn't have been worse, but it didn't really matter. Everywhere I looked spirits were soaring at Phil Fitzpatrick and Penny Perry's book launch for Hawks On High: Everyday Miracles in a Hawk Ridge Season.

A hard rain was falling, and to make matters worse, it was so windy that to use an umbrella was nigh impossible. Add to that the Superior Street construction that made it difficult to figure out how to cross the depression and near muck. As noted, spirits were not dampened, and the musical accompaniment was just what the doctors ordered. Pianist Ryan Frane produced his magic during the first hour of socializing, and Woodblind (Veikko and Jason) lifted hearts in the latter portion. In between, Phil Fitzpatrick thanked oodles of people, told the story of how this project came to be and read several of his poems.

Hawk Ridge director Janelle Long made a few remarks early on, thanking Phil for this book of poems as a tribute to the work there. Janelle said that Phil has been going daily to Hawk Ridge last fall and this fall. Sometimes he even brings pizza for staff.

Hawk Eye by Penny Perry

Penny Perry was Phil's collaborator on this project. If able, you will want to stop in at the Zeitgeist Atrium to see her illustrations and paintings. Phil said her drawings "appeared like magic out of thin air."

Penny said that the biggest challenge was producing illustrations that would coordinate with the shape of the poems. Duluth Poets-Laureate Ellie Schoenfeld and Deb Cooper were the ones who suggested to Phil that he ask her. "Poetry, ink drawings, birds. Oh yeah, that's my wheelhouse." Anyone who has followed Penny Perry's career knows this is so.

For Penny, accuracy was an important part of these drawings. As for all the people who paint and write and make music, she thanks them as well. "You all show up and I appreciate it."

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And a feather.

Phil then proceeded to read to a packed out room. Having watched Phil perform numerous times over the years, I always come away impressed with his ability to command the room. Phil and Penny's goal was to make Hawk Ridge come alive in all the book's readers. For sure this event will undoubtedly prompt more people from the community to visit this resource again soon.

There's a sense in which the poetry reading reminded me of an artist's talk as he told stories leading into many of the poems, their inspiration or important background information.

The first poem he read was "Peregrine Over Hawk Ridge," which opens the section Dramatis Personae and appears on page 47. It begins:

trackless tracer
record holder
soundless
black bullet-bird
cloud piercer

Now you got me, Phil. I want to see one of these.

We even had a hawk present.

Phil described how some of the poems emerged "from something that blew me completely away." Forget the Binos! was one of these.

"Oh, my God! Dude, look! Up there! And forget the binos!"
you hear yourself say as the wingbeat dream begins; just
lean back: you're under a tsunami of striped boomerangs

You can read the rest of this one from page 77.

People who enjoy poetry get jazzed when poets paint images with phrases and word combinations that create an almost electrical charge in your brain synapses. I would compare it to memorable lines in favorite films, or those unforgettable scenes. A film without memorable lines and scene is 'just a movie." Phil's poems are seasoned with ample quantities of lively imagery.

One of my favorite pastimes as a creative is naming paintings, drawings, poems and stories, and I can tell Phil has taken an equal measure of pleasure titling his poems. Here's a smattering of examples.
Rhetorical Question
Kettle
Peregrine Cam
But Who's Counting
Whiteness, For Instance
The Season's Last Bald
Kaitlyn's Wow
Double Gos Tease
Parallax

In fact, any page you open to will give you morsels to chew slowly and savor.

Souvenirs help support Hawk Ridge research.

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Peregrine Falcon, Penny Perry

I recently read a bio of Paul McCartney with a really insightful anecdote about the early days of McCartney and Lennon writing songs together. Each day they would come up with several new tunes and songs, but they didn't write them down. They believed that if something they came up with was destined to be memorable, they would remember it the next day. In this manner they separated the wheat from the chaff.

Phil shared this notion in a similar vein. "The good ideas stay, the everyday miracles."

Tip of the hat to Mike Savage of Savage Press for his assistance in bringing all these pieces together.

Phil & Penny's book can be purchased at Hawk Ridge, at Zenith Bookstore, as well as directly from the author and the artist.

Penny Perry illustrations have been scanned by CPL Imaging. To learn more about the services of CPL Imaging visit cplimaging.com

Related Links
Interview with Phil
Interview with Penny Perry
The Name Game
Savage Press

A Visit with Penny Perry: Long Time Arts Advocate and Duluth Art Scene Asset

The quantity of framing galleries in the Twin Ports region is a pretty good indicator that we have a thriving visual arts community here. Yelp lists 16, from the North Shore to Carlton and Superior to Miller Hill Mall. Perry Framing is located right downtown in what has now been designated Duluth's Historic Arts & Theater (HART) District, a couple doors down from the Zeitgeist Cafe.

Proprietor Penny Perry, an artist herself, has served the arts community in a number of capacities. In addition to framing and hanging shows for the Zeitgeist, she's helped our Duluth Dylan Fest hang shows in the Atrium there. She's also served on the Duluth Public Arts Commission (DPAC) and worked with a wide cross-section of artists to give their work its proper presentation.

This past year she's been creating illustrations for Phil Fitzpatrick's book of poems, Hawks on High: Everyday Miracles in a Hawk Ridge Season. With the official book launch next Monday (Details below) it seemed a good time to share a bit of Penny Perry's story.

EN: How long did you serve on DPAC?

Penny Perry: I served during part of the terms of three administrations, Doty, Bergson and Ness.

EN: What are some of the responsibilities of DPAC that people are unaware of?

PP: The mission priorities change with administrations, but it is a voluntary commission tasked with promoting local arts, cataloging and prioritizing the maintenance and preservation of public cultural properties, serving as an advisory board when local 1% for Public Art is applied, and in general, being a resource for the public to communicate arts issues and advocacy.

EN: You've been framing and part of the art community for more than four decades. How would you describe the evolution of our arts community during this period of time?

PP: Subjectively, I think artists used to be more like islands, either individually, by discipline, or even according to related studio spaces. We are fortunate in this community to have strong, involved, practicing artists across many disciplines.

There is a history of collaboration among poets, musicians, dancers, actors and visual artists in Duluth. Some leaders of these collaborative efforts that have inspired me personally are Ellie Schoenfeld, Sara Thomsen, Ann Klefstad, Chris Monroe, Julie Ahasay and Lisa McKhann, to name a few. If you asked ten others to name ten other influential working artists, they could do it in a minute and they would be equally diverse across disciplines. That is the art community I now know and appreciate. You might guess modern communication and social media plays a big part, but still, people have to show up, and they do.

EN: Birds seem to be a recurring theme in your work. How did that begin and what is it that makes birds so endlessly fascinating?

PP: My first truly personal artwork was a colored pencil drawing that included a blackbird and was inspired by Truman Capote's Grass Harp & A tree of Night.

I grew up on a farm and have ridden wooded trails on horseback all my life. My whole family feeds, observes and loves birds. Yet, it is the metaphysical aspects and questions about birds that continue to impose themselves into my work. They are, at once, vulnerable and strong and the magically reliable harbingers of the seasons.

EN: How did you come to be involved with Phil's project?

PP: A little bird named Ellie Schoenfeld suggested it to Phil. I had a show at the Duluth Art Institute at the time, Phil checked it out, and asked me if I would be interested in his project. I thought, “poetry, birds and ink drawings” and couldn't say yes fast enough. We found our collaborative footing quite easily.

EN: What was the most rewarding aspect of this project for you?

PP: I might not even know that yet, but the rewards of bringing this project to fruition were many. It was a great opportunity to be asked to add a layer of imagery to Phil's poems, but, I challenged myself to try and be biologically accurate enough to please birders without losing the underlying wonder of the subjects of the poems. Over the last year and a half I spent a lot of time observing, photographing, researching and finally drawing with the kind of focus that is rare. For an artist, there's nothing better.

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BOOK LAUNCH DETAILS
The book launch will be at the Zeitgeist Atrium on Monday, September 9 from 5 p.m. until 9 p.m. Ryan Frane will be playing during the reception and art show (5-6), and Woodblind will play from 7-9 after the poetry reading.

Books can be purchased at Hawk Ridge, at Zenith Bookstore, as well as directly from the author and the artist.

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Phil Fitzpatrick Talks About His New Book of Poems, Hawks on High: Everyday Miracles in a Hawk Ridge Season

Photo by Margie Menzies.

I've gotten to know Phil Fitzpatrick through our mutual affiliation with the Duluth Dylan Fest in recent years. A Harvard grad and career teacher, he's passionate about golf, poetry and life. His new book is titled Hawks on High: Everyday Miracles in a Hawk Ridge Season.

Hawk Ridge is a Nature Reserve here in Duluth, Minnesota. It is a book of poems inspired by this very special place, with pen-and-ink drawings by local artist Penny Perry.

It's exciting to see that the book is now in print, which makes it a good time to share Phil's story, learn more about his motivations and discover new insights regarding raptor watching.

EN: What prompted you to produce a book of poems about hawks and other raptors?

Phil Fitzpatrick: This book is a happy accident born of my fascination, if somewhat belated, with flight and migration introduced to me in the fall of 2017 by my friend and college classmate, Elizabeth Hunter, who has been watching raptors at Rockfish Gap in Virginia for years. But more specifically, the first poem came a few days after we had started watching. One poem followed another until I started thinking I could capture some of the more ineffable qualities not just of migration but of all the folks who work and who visit up at Hawk Ridge.

EN: What is it that makes Hawk’s Ridge such an unusual geographic/topographic place to watch migrating hawks?

PF: Raptors hate to fly over water, but they love catching thermal currents that rise up off the bluffs of Lake Superior's North Shore. The rock ridge is composed of a form of basalt called diabase, and it is a billion years old. The age of the location, the fantastic view of Lake Superior far below, and the always fascinating birds that fly overhead make it a spectacular raptor watching site, one of the most renowned in the country, if not the world.

Cover design, illustration by Penny Perry

EN: How many other such places do you think there are in the world?

PF: There are hundreds of such sites in the world, and I would hate to guess how many thousands of people watch, study, write about, band, and photograph these birds. Yet with all this attention year after year, there are so many mysteries and secrets the birds possess. We only know part of the story, and it is this mystery and this history that intrigue me. The poems that were hardest to write are the ones that make an attempt to imagine what goes on during migration and to imagine how far back such activity actually got started.

EN: The book is illustrated by local artist Penny Perry. How did you come to choose Penny for this project?

PF: I did not know Penny before we began our collaboration. I just knew she had a shop downtown, two doors west of the Zeitgeist Arts Cafe (where our book release party will be held). I was planning to use photographs to illustrate at least some of the poems, but I'm not a photographer which meant that I'd have to beg, borrow, steal, pay for the photos others have taken. That seemed like a huge, not to say sprawling, challenge and a big distraction. My friend and fellow poet Ellie Schoenfeld suggested I ask Penny if she'd illustrate the poems. I followed through on the suggestion, and to my surprise and delight, Penny said yes. That choice and the choice to ask Mike Savage to publish the book remain the two smartest choices I have made in this project. (You can read how I really feel about Penny's contributions in the Acknowledgments section of the book.)

Illustration by Penny Perry

EN: Can you name two or three poets who especially inspire you?

PF: I am inspired by more poets than you are permitting me, including several local poets. For this book alone, I am continually "guided" by Philip Larkin, John Ashbery, and Jane Hirshfield. I suppose there are a few poems that contain some of Mary Oliver's influence as well as a little bit of Robinson Jeffers. But even just naming these few masters here makes me feel like I am barely in the foothills of the true craft of poetry.

There was, and still remains so much work to do to cut through all the bullshit surrounding human existence to arrive at some small amount of truth that underlies the absolute miracle of avian flight and migration. Not just the science of it, either, but the quintessential nature and truth of it. If I come anywhere close to that in even just one poem, I will have achieved something extraordinary. And there is simply the "miracle" of Hawk Ridge itself, the fact of countless numbers of people--staff, volunteers, first time visitors and seasoned veterans--all regularly working to expand our collective knowledge of and familiarity with this miracle, this "everyday miracle" we have here in Duluth every autumn.

EN: What is the biggest surprise or most interesting lesson you’ve learned from watching the hawk migrations at Hawk Ridge?

PF: How little we really know, how little we really truly know about what migration can teach us about our planet, the birds that surround us, and believe it or not, about ourselves.

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BOOK LAUNCH DETAILS
The book launch will be at the Zeitgeist Atrium on Monday, September 9 from 5 p.m. until 9 p.m. Ryan Frane will be playing during the reception and art show (5-6), and Woodblind will play from 7-9 after the poetry reading.

Books can be purchased at Hawk Ridge, at Zenith Bookstore, as well as directly from the author and the artist.

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Local Art Seen: Penny Perry in the John Steffl Gallery at the Depot

Despite nasty Northland weather last Thursday evening, as many as 250 people stopped in at the opening reception for three new exhibitions at the Duluth Art Institute: Tia Keobounpheng's 100 Days in the Corridor Gallery, David Short's Type 13 in the Morrison Gallery and Penny Perry's Art & Craft in the Steffl.

Perry's pieces reflected a variety of mediums from ink on paper and acrylic on canvas to stained glass, photography and wood. A number of paintings featured a bird-character that made me think of surrealist Max Ernst's Loplop, a birdlike character that appeared in his collages and paintings that in his case served as an alter-ego.

Penny Perry has played an instrumental role in helping the Zeitgeist maintain wall art in the restaurant and Atrium. A handout accompanying the show states that she "is the youngest of four daughters that grew up on the family farm in Spooner, Wisconsin. Her life is blessed with creative, generous teachers and mentors, two and four-legged. She graduated UW-Superior with a degree in Theater & Art and for the past thirty-seven years has owned/operated the family business Perry Framing & Stained Glass that still maintains its original location in Downtown Duluth."

She has a strong following in the local arts scene, quietly influential.

Again, from her statement: “I relish in details of texture, juxtaposition, layered depth of color. Refined shape of negative space. Tension and resonance between colors, notes, words...I trust my right hand-to-eye to draw what I see, and the left to paint what isn’t seen. “

"Woven Together" -- Copper wire and driftwood

Titles always interest me. Here are a few titles of pieces in this show: The Dream Disintegrates Sideways, After the Torrent, Inadvertent Imprint, Hard Times Chair Tumbles from the Past, Oliver Reflections, Lost Marble, Dreamed Memory and Temporal Display, among many others. Be sure to pick up the handout when you visit.

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DAI MEMBER SHOW REMINDER
It's that time of year again. Wednesday through Friday is the window for bringing work to the Duluth Art Institute for the DAI Member Show. The show itself is the following Thursday, January 25. This show, which features a new piece of artwork created by members during the past year, is always very special and takes place in the Great Hall of the Depot, 5:00 p.m. till 7:00 p.m. A highlight of the show is a member-selected "Best of Show" piece. It's rewarding to see how much variety and talent there is in the community.

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Get into it.