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Life, hoops and other musings: Award-winning PSU poet Davis hunts for inspiration from the land

TIPTON – Todd Davis forged through the undergrowth of wooded State Game Lands No. 158 northwest of here, stopping first at a meandering Loup Run. He pointed to a dark hole under the roots of a fallen tree, where he has caught more than one native brook trout.

Not quite a mile farther into the forest, Davis rewarded the newcomer with a stroll on a barely functioning 1930s dam and a view of a clear pool where fingerlings hovered along the bottom and a grown one darted to deeper waters. This is the place where his two boys spent their youthful summers. It is where Davis spends up to eight hours on good days.

He likes to hunt and fish it, but that isn’t his main reason for being here.

Davis is an oft-published and award-winning poet, and these woods, along with Game Lands No. 108 farther west, are his research lab and sources of inspiration. He is the latest winner of the Kjell Meling Award for Distinction in the Arts and Humanities by Penn State Altoona, where he is a professor of English and environmental studies.

“Through its subject matter, Todd’s poetry is uniquely accessible to students and the public,” said Dr. Brian Black, head of the Division of Arts & Humanities at Penn State Altoona that led the selection process.

The award is named after the late Penn State Altoona administrator for his love of literature and language and his unwavering support for the development of the faculty as scholars and artists, according to a univeristy press release.

“Gritty, detailed realism of nature’s processes – from the last gasps of a dying white-tailed deer to a father’s love of his offspring – allow readers from all over the country to relate Todd’s poetry to the world around them,” Black said. “A real treat of Todd’s poetry, though, for those of us who call Central PA home, is that his primary subject matter is the unique nature that surrounds us.”

Davis calls it “HomeGround,” defined in his essay of the same name as observing and learning about where one lives. His “Canticle for Native Brook Trout,” for example, was inspired by his time spent alongside Loup Run just above its confluence with Tipton Run and below the Tipton Reservoir:

The small fish that have been here

for thousands of years

lay in on flat rock that lines

the streambed, or hide beneath

the shelves where water

pours over fallen trees.

After reading the longer, complete version of the poem while standing by Loup Run, Davis insisted that poetry isn’t just for the uber-educated or sophisticated. (If you pay attention, you realize he’s not talking about stocked trout, but ones that have been here since North America rose from oceans).

“I think a sixth- or seventh-grader can understand that,” he said. “You listen to music all the time. A poem is the same thing. You don’t need any special language to listen to a rap song, a rock song.”

You don’t need to know the difference between slant rhyme and alliteration to appreciate a poem, he said.

“We’ve made poetry so academic,” he complained.

There is nothing academic about Davis’ “Dreams of the Dead Father.” You mourn with him his loss, but marvel over his talks with his father whose ashes were spread under huckleberry bushes on the slope just up from the overgrown trail.

His “HomeGround” also is reflected in his “Circus Train Detrailment,” a poem he wrote about an historic event in nearby Tyrone in 1893 that he studied so he could learn the history of this area – because he isn’t from here.

“I have seen Todd doggedly study and learn about his adopted home,” Black said. “Each of his poems becomes a nugget of local knowledge. I learn from each one.”

Davis grew up in Elkhart, Ind., the son of a veterinarian and a school teacher, who impressed on him the love of the land and poetry. He also played basketball, starting in the sixth grade, and was good enough to get a college scholarship to play at Grace College, about an hour from home.

“I always wanted to play in the NBA,” he said, adding that the seemingly disparate callings aren’t different at all.

“Basketball is artful,” and writing poetry is like playing the game, Davis insisted.

“You study the best poets, learn the techniques and practice over and over again,” he said, before displaying full knowledge of a player bringing the ball up court, doing a crossover dribble to shake the defender, and drive to the basket and score – or dish to an open teammate. “You have practiced that crossover so many times – it becomes such a part of who you are – that you don’t have time to think about it.”

While at Grace, one of his best friends since junior high was playing on scholarship at Northern Illinois University.

“We were very close friends since seventh grade,” Davis said. “I had a crush on her, but I didn’t want to ruin the friendship.”

He decided to take a chance after they finished their bachelor’s degrees.

He and Shelly were married within a year. That was 28 years ago. She went on to coach at her alma mater, while he went on to earn a master’s and a doctorate in English there after two years of teaching high school.

Davis taught one year of college in upstate New York before he and his wife returned to Indiana and Goshen College. There he worked his way up to associate professor and chairman of the English Department. His first collection of poetry, called “Ripe,” was published in 2002.

The next year, when he was 38, Penn State Altoona offered Davis a teaching position. He had to consider that not only would he be leaving a tenured position, he would be uprooting Shelly from her nearby family. His parents already had retired from Elkhart to the hardwoods of Massachusetts. But it turned out not to be a hard sale for the family – with two boys at that point – to leave the more barren Indiana for the wooded mountains of Central Pennsylvania, he said.

“When I got here, my writing really took off,” he said. “This sort of place speaks to me.”

His second book of poems, “Some Heaven,” was published in 2007. A chapbook called “Household of Water, Moon and Snow: The Thoreau Poems” came in 2010, along with “The Least of These.” That was followed in 2013 with “In the Kingdom of the Ditch” and just this year, “Winterkill.”

And, those are just his books of poems. More than 400 individual poems have been published far and wide, from The Christian Science Monitor to the weekly syndicated column “Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry,” which appears in newspapers across the country, including the Mirror.

Davis was editor of several anthologies, including “Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball.” You can look up a video trailer that accompanies the book on YouTube. In it, you can hear him read his essay and watch him, at 46, shoot 3 pointers, making 12 of 13 during the one-minute clip.

“The only poem I wanted to write was on the basketball court,” he reads.

Davis, now 51, said he “simply wasn’t good enough” to achieve the NBA dream, but he did play in high school, college and men’s leagues with the likes of Rick Fox, Shawn Kemp and Scott Skiles. He has passed his love of the game to his two sons. Noah just wrapped up his junior year on a basketball scholarship at Seton Hill, and Nathan will be entering Seton Hill on scholarship in the fall as a freshman after wrapping up a senior year at Bellwood-Antis High School where he was the Altoona Mirror Player of the Year.

In addition to Davis’ poetry, he has contributed to books and reference materials, written reviews, made presentations and more. He also conducts workshops and poetry readings (Check his website at www.ToddDavisPoet.com for his schedule).

His awards include the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize and the Chautauqua Editors Prize, and he has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. To understand how prolific he is, his curriculum vitae is 46 pages long.

Getting the Meling Award was special, Davis said, because that is who hired him at Penn State Altoona, “a man who loved the arts and humanities, who thought art could transform the way we live and what that living might mean.

“Those are values that are integral to why I write and teach,” he said.

Davis also likes to think he might make a difference in how locals look at the land.

“The reason this is important to me is that I want the citizens of this region to understand how important our environment is to who we are,” he said.

He defends the hunting of deer, for example, because humans have destroyed their natural predators, resulting in an overpopulation of deer and to a lack of bio-diversity and unhealthy forests.

“We don’t own the earth. The earth owns us,” he said, expressing concern with climate change and other factors that could impact quality of life on the planet.

While getting published and receiving recognition is “icing on the cake,” Davis said, “I’d still keep coming out here and writing if no one ever published another one of my poems.”

Mirror Life Writer Cherie Hicks is at 949-7030.

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