Category Archives: Ethel Mortenson Davis

September 20, 2026 · 3:57 pm

The Accomplishment of Ethel Mortenson Davis as a Poet

In the latest issue of Poetry Highland, a Chinese/English bilingual journal of poetry edited by Yingcal Xu, Ethel Mortenson Davis’s photo, along with the photos of the other poets in issue 5, appears on the back cover. For several years now, Ethel, who is, of course, the love of my life, has had her poems translated into Chinese through journals associated with Xu.

When I first read Ethel’s poems when I was twenty years old and attending Mesa Junior College in Grand Junction, Colorado, what struck me was how powerful they were as they explored themes that seemed to be much larger than those I was attempting to imbed into my efforts at becoming a poet. The intensity of the images

For You

You

smell like

wild snow

or

of trees

that hug

the earth.

Turn your head.

            you can hear

            the moss

            cling to the sides

            of trees

            and the sun

            make your hair

            the color

            of red honey.

Not there.

Leave that hill

unnoticed.

stunned me. The intensity of the images, as well as what I thought of as “their originality,” seemed some powerful that I wondered if I could every become half the poet this young woman, the sister of someone I knew, already was. “make your hair/the color/of red honey.” Who would have ever seen that?

We have been married for close to 59 years now, and the truth is that my amazement of her accomplishments as a poet has never ceased. She has published eight volumes of poetry at this point, and she is working on a new book. We are in our eighties now, but her ability to write or create wonderful pastels has never flagged during all these years.

This is the third essay I have written about her poetry. In the last essay I showed how her poetry has its roots in imagistic, Chinese, and even the philosophy driving beat poetry, expecting readers to construct the meaning of the poems by pairing disparate images and connecting those images to what she is expressing without directly saying what she is meaning.

This poetic technique is becoming increasingly common in the AI age, although it is an ancient technique as I showed in my last Ethel essay. In the Navajo poet Sherman Bitsui’s book, Flood Song, as an example, images with, on the surface, little relationship with each other, creating poems that are almost surrealistic in their juxtapositions. The poems always are grounded in the natural world of Navajoland, the high desert, mountains, canyons, buttes, and flora, fauna, and geology, but reading Bitsui requires the reader to reach beyond logic to find meaning in the wholeness, sometimes violence, of intense, clashing images.

Just realizing that when you approach an Ethel Mortenson Davis poem you have to look for more than what appears on the surface really doesn’t begin to explain the importance of what she has accomplished. The work of a lot of contemporary poets, although it is truly valuable and worth the effort to read and explore, leaves too many people, at least in American culture, feeling that they can’t really understand poetry–so why bother?

The majority of Ethel’s readers don’t normally have the reaction. Almost everything she writes is easily accessible to almost all readers, even young people. Our daughter Sonja teaches fifth and sixth graders at the Catholic school in Burlington, Wisconsin, and she keeps informing her mother that several students, year after year, when they do their creative writing unit, just “love” her mother’s poetry.

An early poem like “Spotted Pony”

The Spotted Pony

When the last leaf

has touched the earth

unseen,

and the sky is bright

like a spotted pony,

spring touches me

with her warm, soft muzzle,

exploring me with moist breath

and ballooning nostrils,

questioning me

with quick nudges

and rude pushes,

until I jump on her back

and ride full gallop

against the wind,

holding on tight

to her warm, round belly.

can be read by anyone, and the image of spring as a spotted pony creates an image and metaphor that is immediately accessible. The exuberance of the poem jumps off the page. Admittedly, there is more to the poem than just the image it presents and the emotion it engenders. What is Ethel saying about the nature of the earth, spring, and humanity itself? I think that’s buried in the meaning of the poem even if I am sure none of Sonja’s students think about the poem if they read it that way. Nor do the majority of her readers.

In Archibald MacLeish’s poem, Ars Poetica, as I pointed out in my last essay about Ethel’s poetry, he says, “”A poem should not mean / But be”. What MacLeish is getting at is the idea that poetry is not a mere collection of words when it reaches its apex. It is not about ideas or fact or arguments. Nor should it be taken literally. It should not be utilitarian, teaching or persuading or having a specific purpose or aim.

Instead transcendent poetry achieves a timelessness that relates humanity and the natural world through time through a poem that is a work of art like a Leonardo da Vinci painting or a Rodin sculpture or any human effort that exists within space but also like a singularity, a unique point where rules, equations, or even predictions break down. It is a living “be”. It is. It is a singular work of art.

Again, this is really an ancient equation. Both Chinese and Japanese poetry strives for exactly this kind of ideal. Certainly some of the ancient poetry of the Western tradition like Beowulf or the Finnish epic Kalevala or any number of poems that seem like stories but transcend the time that they depict are living “be” in MacLeish’s formulation.

In a talk given outside at the Norbert Blei’s old chicken shack at the Write On Door County writing center in Door County recently, Al DeGenova, a contemporary poet and the editor of After Hours literary magazine, said the Blei’s theory of poetry, drawn from the writings of Alan Ginsburg and Jack Kerouak, among other beat poets, was that poems should come from a trance-like state where the poem arises from an unconscious space in the poet. It should touch the ancient springs of experience that echoes into the poet’s contemporary life.

I have always thought that the best poems Ethel has written over the years exemplify MacLeish’s idea that a poem must be.

A poem like Emily Dickinson’s “I Could Not Stop for Death” goes beyond what most of us think about when we consider mortality and its role in our lives. The themes in the poem stack up into almost hymn: the personification of death as a courteous gentleman rather than something terrifying laying ahead of all of us; the carriage journey as a symbol of the progression of life passing children at play, fields of grain, and the setting sun; the depiction of a grave as a home; then the idea of centuries feeling shorter than a single day.

In a different way, Ethel’s poem, “Rainwater,” is every bit as expansive even though it is not one of her most notices poems:

Rainwater

All night

I heard the dog

barking for someone

to help him.

Over the week

his barks became weaker,

until they ceased.

Today the rains

came gently, slowly.

I had to adjust

the rain gutter outside

and got my hair wet.

Rain in the desert

is a cleansing,

renewing

experience,

cleaning what man

leaves in all the earth.

Passing the hall mirror,

I noticed my hair

shiny, soft and curly.

I remember when you

ran outside to catch

the rainwater.

You said it made your hair

so beautiful and shiny,

cleaning it

like nothing else.

Today, in the field,

the vultures are circling.

The ominous note in the last line, “The vultures are circling,” is contrasted with the gentle rain and getting the poet’s hair wet and the address to you, someone the poet obviously cares about, and their reflection about rainwater making hair “so beautiful and shiny,/cleaning it/like nothing else.” All of this is inside the frame of “the dog/barking for someone/to help him./Over the week/his barks became weaker,/until they ceased.” I’ll let the reader decipher the multiple meanings derived from the juxtaposed images. This is not a particularly comfortable poem. Nor is “I Could Not Stop for Death” by Dickinson.

Ethel’s poem is anchored in an image of a particular moment in time. Dickinson’s and Ethel’s poems are obviously dramatically different. But both, in the end, seem are delving beyond conscious reality into something deeper, perhaps a vision drawn from what Carl Jung called the “collective unconscious,” that place in human experience that reaches into all human experience and become enlightenment.

None of the really serious poets, despite their cultivated reputations, are sunshine poets. Ethel and I saw a documentary about Mary Oliver’s life recently and were shocked by how difficult a life and how much she marched to a different drummer. That life and her alternative lifestyle was in the reality of who she was. She has had the reputation of a modern day transcendentalist, in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry Thoreau, or maybe a mixture of both. Still, much of her poetry has shadowed themes of predation, death, and trauma.

Similarly, the public perception of Robert Frost as the white haired grandfather poet who uses nature to teach us the wonder of nature and the human condition ignores a whole body of some of his most brilliant poetry. A poem like “Home Burial” where a husband perceives his wife’s concentration on the grave mounds of their children out of an upstairs window explores the depth of isolation of two people close to each other who could not be further apart–and is really cold-eyed in its depiction of a certain reality. Or there is always “The Witch of Coos” that tells the eerie and unsettling story of bones rising from the cellar and getting locked in the attic, exploring guilt and the terror of secrets within a household.

In some ways, my favorite book of Ethel’s is Letter on the Horizon’s Poem (Kelsay Books), which starts in darkness. A poem like:

Winter Soldier[1]

They have come home

to hate war,

the winter soldiers,

after being in Iraq.

Some had fun

killing civilians.

Some did not like

killing them,

picking them off

as they walked

along the streets,

or rode their bicycles,

or drove in their cars.

Maybe, if we stay

long enough,

we’ll get rid of

all the Iraqis.  

Blackwater convoys

came up a one-way street

the wrong way.

Cars coming down

tried to pull off

and were shot, people

killed in their cars.

A doctor and his mother

were in one of the cars.

Blackwater shot the young man

while the mother

clung to her son,

but the car did not stop

so Blackwater fired

a missile into the car.

It became an inferno.

Both mother and son

fused together.

Seventeen civilians

were killed

[1] Stories from returning Iraqi soldiers against the Iraq War at Silver Springs, Maryland, March 15, 2008.

This is a poem that had an edge. It is political, contemporary, and still manages to reflect on humanity and the terror that has created and is still creating. The final image is not comfortable for anyone to see in their mind’s eye.

The book moves from darkness to the earth. Animals and landscape saturate nearly every poem she has written — rattlesnakes, wolves, bears, horses, rabbits, dragonflies, birds in her poetry, and in this section nature is dominant, and nature becomes an enabler of each of our humanness.

Sweetgrass

It is a time

when the smell

of sweetgrass

hangs heavy

in the ear

of summer,

when light lingers long

in the night,

and we let go of

what is not right in the world,

when we drift

across the tall grasses

to where fireflies

are whispering

to each other.

In this small pocket

of summer,

the deer

have finally

let themselves

be seen.

Then the book moves to healing, a section that contains some of her most powerful poems:

The Healer

“…you have been yourself at the edge of the Deep Canyon and have come back unharmed”  An Elder of the San Juan Pueblo. 1959. V. Laski. Seeking Life.

“I was invisible” An Asiatic Eskimo. 1980. D. Cloutier. Spirit Spirit, Shaman Songs.

In the snowy canyons

you came to me

as an eagle

and whispered

(in almost audible sounds)

“the key to the secret

of healing. . .”

For my wounds

had gone beyond wounds

and had festered

into deep holes

in my sides,

and gangrene had set in,

but, in a whisper,

you came and said,

“you have the keys within you.

You are the stars

in the starry night.

You are the source

at the mouth of rivers.

You have the medicine

to heal

already in your bones.”

And my wounds became

as faint as the sound

of feathers,

as pale as the ringed moon.

And the healer

came to me

in the face of the wolf.

She came

and nodded to me

with her deep intelligence,

and her eyes told me,

“your spirit is strength.

Your force is as great

as volcanoes,

for your goodness prevails

over the dark;

your goodness

has brought you out

of the deep canyon.”

And again the healer

came to me.

This time as a bear,

a joyous white bear

with great white paws,

and she told me,

“you were invisible,

but now I see you.

You have gone

to the edge of the great canyon

but have come back

unharmed.

“And now your laughter

will become

as mountainous as thunder,

and your tears

will be the tears of glory!”

I tell you.

I have put my ear

to the great Earth

and have felt your presence.

The complete book moves through a seven-book structure (Darkness → War → Earth → Remembering a Son → Healing → Life → Endings) and traces a deliberate arc: from personal and historical trauma, through grounding in the natural/spiritual world and grief for a child, toward healing, ordinary life, and finally a ear-eyed reckoning with mortality. Eight themes dominate the collection: War and human cruelty,;the natural world as mirror, witness, and teacher; indigenous spirituality and healing traditions; healing and resilience; aging, mortality, and endings; environmental loss; the poet’s own solitude and vocation.

When I’ve written an essay on Ethel’s poetry in the past, I’ve analyzed individual poems, the traditions the poem belong to, the techniques she used, and how all of that ended up fashioning the meanings she imbedded into what she’d written. What I wanted to try to accomplish with this essay was an analysis of how the body of her work is much more substantive than what could be explored by focusing on any one poem or even small groups of poetry.

By giving emphasizing A Letter on the Horizon’s Poem, I don’t mean to deemphasize her other books. Each individual volume has its own strength, as is true of almost every serious poet who has created a substantial body of work. In A Gatherer, of days and lights and secret places, she pairs her poems with 12 full-color photographs of pastels, giving that particular volume a sense of the breadth of her accomplishment as both poet and artist. Her success in the Chinese/English journals comes from a lifetime of producing, since the days when she was a teenager, poem after poem and art work after art work that, at least to her husband, adds up to a significant artistic accomplishment. What more can any artist in any medium wish to achieve?

Leave a comment

Filed under Essays, Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

September 13, 2026 · 7:08 pm

Mountain Home

a pastel by Ethel Mortenson Davis

A colorful abstract landscape featuring a snow-capped mountain, swirling clouds, and a night sky with stars and a crescent moon.

1 Comment

Filed under Art, Art by Ethel Mortenson Davis, Ethel Mortenson Davis

Tagged as , , , ,

August 8, 2026 · 3:57 pm

The Meaning Between the Images: Ethel Mortenson Davis and the Poetrics of Juxtaposition

I suppose I shouldn’t be writing essays about Ethel Mortenson Davis’s poetry.  After all, she’s been my wife for close to 59 years now.  But what I’ve noticed over the years is that too many people, though obviously not everyone, sees a poem of hers and feels a certain spark of delight at the image it sparks in their head.

A short poem she just wrote (so many of her poems are short) brought that to the front of my thoughts:

Pollen-Sacs

A frenzied flock of thrushes,

thin and desperately looking for food,

left us worried and wondering.

A bumble bee with huge pollen-sacs

attached to his legs

struggles to fly homeward—your eyes flash.

Like so much of her poetry, you can read this poem, or better yet, listen to Ethel read it out loud, and you can see the two images:  The starving flock of thrushes and the bumble bee with huge pollen-sacs.  But the question is, what is in the poem beyond the images?

Years ago, even before we were first married in Grand Junction, Colorado, I learned to distrust my first reaction to both her poetry and her art.  What you see is inevitably there, but if you leave what’s there at that, you probably are reacting to what’s there rather than understanding the depth of what’s there and the meaning.

In this particular poem, it’s easy to read the first stanza, see that it is about thrushes frenzied in their desperate search for food, go to the second stanza and see the word “struggles” and assume that it is a poem about creatures that are struggling, maybe from the Canadian or western U.S. wildfires so prominent in the world today.

Certainly, there is a layer in the poem that suggest that global climate change might be affecting the thrushes who are in a state where they are desperately looking for food, but pollen sacs are larvae food, providing essential protein, fats, and vitamins that baby bees need to grow.  A bumble bee struggling to carry two of them attached to his legs is not struggling in the sense the frenzied flock of thrushes are.  The bee has collected abundance and are struggling to get what it has gathered of richness found inside flowers it has visited home.

Another element in the poem is that the pollen in the pollen sacs is essential to life on the planet earth since, as the bee flies from flower to flower, the pollen brushes off on the next flower, helping with the pollination process that is necessary to so much food production around the world as well as the diversity of plant-life that in turn feeds into the diversity of insects and animal-life that keep the entire natural world vibrant.

Therefore, the poem is constructed of a parallelism, one image juxtaposed with another.  This creates a complexity of meanings that, admittedly, demands some understanding of science but creates an even deeper level of poetic meaning, exploring all kinds of issues overwhelming our current world.

Therefore, the poem does contain an implied warning.  The thrushes desperate for food leave us wondering why they are desperate?  What has caused that in a world that flows from the bee as part of the chain of events that creates diversity and. even throughout so much of history, fecundity in the natural world?  Are they migrants from wildfire or severe drought or some other disaster?  The poem doesn’t give us a clue.  It just gives us the image of a fact.

But it also gives us a lesson about bees and the larger importance of diversity in a time when the idea of protecting diversity found in either the natural world or human populations is under attack. 

The bee with pollen sacs so heavy that it struggles to make it home causes your eyes to flash.  The bee is a symbol of hope.  It is flying home to feed the larvae that is going to propagate the hive into the next generation.

That hope is contrasted with the desperate flock of thrushes.

What looks like a simple image or even set of images is not always simple, especially in poetry and art, especially Ethel’s poetry and art.

The Chinese Tradition of Poetry

At the heart of what Ethel tries to do in so much of her poetry does flow from two major sources:  the major one is the traditional Chinese tradition of poetry where concrete images, juxtaposition, suggestion, and meaning are generated through the relationship between images.  There needs to be an intuitive leap by the reader to take the images, juxtaposition(s), and suggestions presented by the poem to discover the meaning of the poem. 

In this sense, the aesthetic convergence of a poem, or even a work of art, can be much more interesting, and an act of discovery, as direct influence.  In Archibald MacLeish’s poem, “Ars Poetica”, he claimed that a poem should mean, not say, although that’s admittedly not the exact phrase from the poem. Poetry is not generally deductive science, making hypotheses and then testing those until hard truths are either proven or disproven.  It is the art of seeing the universe in a blade of grass, which comes out of Walt Whitman’s line, ““I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars…”

The Imagistic Tradition of Poetry

The second major continuity in Ethel’s body of work is the modern imagistic tradition starting with Ezra Pound.  Pound had several ideas about what a poem should be when he first started writing about imagism.  According to Pound, a poem should:

 Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.

 Use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

 As regarding rhythm: compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

In applying this sense of poetic construction, Pound defined an image, which should, at least in his view, be at the heart of modern poetry, as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”  That means that an image in poetry is made up of:

 what we literally see;

 an emotional response;

 an intellectual recognition;

 associations that aren’t explicitly stated;

 relationships to other images.

In Ethel’s poem, “Pollen-Sacs,” the title leads us to notice that this is the central image.  The thrushes give us hunger, desperation, uncertainty and perhaps ecological disturbance.  The bumblebee gives us effort, abundance, fertility, reproduction and continuity.

But the poem doesn’t explain those things. It presents them.  The reader experiences the relationship between them.

The Value of Empty Space

I want to end this essay by talking briefly about Chinese art.  Traditional Chinese landscape painting often isn’t about reproducing a landscape photographically. It creates a relationship among elements—mountain, water, tree, mist, human figure, empty space—so that the viewer enters the painting and completes the experience.

Even in her abstract pastels and paintings, Ethel usually tries to do the same thing.  This is part of what relates her poetry to her art.

In her poetry she gives us the image (or thing in Pound’s formulation).  In the case of “Pollen-Sacs” we have the thrushes and the bumble bee.  Then she leaves a conceptual space between them.  This is designed to lead us into first a visual and emotional reaction, then to a question (why are the images so different from each other?), which leads, hopefully, to thinking about the poem’s meaning.

Conclusion

I suspect that this is what I have been learning from Ethel for nearly 59 years. I have learned not to rush to explain what I see in her poems or paintings either to myself or others. I have learned to stay with the image for a while, to look at what is there and then to pay attention to what is not there and to let others discover what they can find and understand for themselves.

The meaning is often in that space.

In “Pollen-Sacs,” the thrushes and the bumblebee never meet. Ethel doesn’t tell us what connects them. She doesn’t tell us whether the thrushes are victims of a changing world, whether the bee represents hope, or whether the two images are part of some larger warning about the fragile web of life. She gives us the images and leaves the space between them open.

Leave a comment

Filed under Essays, Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,

March 4, 2026 · 9:39 am

Ethel Davis: Mastering Metaphor in Minimalist Poetry

By Thomas Davis

Ethel Mortenson Davis is a poet that has published eight books of poetry and been published in literary journals and anthologies. The Wisconsin Library Association named her book, Under the Tail of the Milky Way Galaxy, a significant book of poetry by a Wisconsin poet. She has also been a poet laureate for Door County, Wisconsin.

Ever since I have known Ethel, and realized that she is a better poet than I will ever be, I have been fascinated by how she can condense power and meaning into so few lines they are almost, though not quite, haiku. What brought this to the top of my mind was a poem she presented to the poetry group we attend once a month:

Pain

She pulls me from
my deepest sleep.
I tell her leave me alone
where I am happy and safe.

But she gets her way and 
stretches me to the top of
of some canyon wall
and tells me, 
this is your reality now.

The power of this poem is, at least to me, undeniable.  It expressed in 9 lines what so many people, especially as they get older and face the ravages of arthritis or other ailments, have to confront as they struggle to deal with what they cannot escape.  It also contains the yearning within the complex of pain for the happiness and safety that is still in the deepest memory of the poet inside "deepest sleep."

When Ethel first showed me what she had written, it reminded me of another powerful small poem, "blackness"

blackness
seeps
in my room.
he crawls up
onto my lap
like the uninvited guest
he always is.

i keep hoping
he’ll leave
before dinner.

originally published in her collection, A Letter on the Horizon's Poem, published by Kelsay Books.

This poem is more metaphorical, of course.  Blackness is a metaphor, but the poem again expresses what so much of humanity faces at different times in their lives and, with a touch of humor, in ten lines explores and expresses a dilemma and experience that is at the heart of all of our lives as we journey toward the inevitability central to our existence as human beings.

One of Ethel's early poems that I first read before I had met her in Grand Junction, Colorado when she drove with her sister Pat to visit her sister Lorraine helped to make me aware of what an extraordinary poet the person I was about to meet really was

White Delirium

Oh,
how the white delirium
has set in me.

Memories ache in my throat.
Sweetness stains my mouth.

I cannot forget
your eyes
that cried out to me,
the end of us!

In many ways, Ethel is an imagist poet.  Certainly the images she paints can be almost overwhelmingly powerful.  "Memories ache in my throat.". The creative force of that image is then paired with "Sweetness stains my mouth."  Then the last four lines that makes us construct the meaning out of the poem, as does the blackness poem, by giving us an image that is startling and powerful as it communicates separation and the delirium accompanying a separation that is, what?  The creator of delirium or the result of a relationship that was delirious in its substance.  We have to create the meaning of the poem as it relates to our own experiences and lives, all in nine lines.  This was originally published in A Letter on the Horizon's Poem.

The truth is that Ethel's poetry of ten lines and under could fill an entire volume itself, and the resulting collection would be amazing.  One of my favorites of all her small poems is "Night Sky", originally published in Rimrock Poets Magazine that Richard Brenneman and I put together when we were young in Grand Junction, and I was just getting to know Ethel.

Night Sky

The stars laugh and laugh,
laughing in an ocean of laughter,
moving-water laughter,
until the sky can hold no more
and joins in laughing
with black face and shining teeth.

Just the joy and the power of the image and the expression of support for the naturalness and importance of blackness during a time of racial injustice has delighted me ever since I first saw it in Ethel's handwriting on a brown piece of newsprint.

As I said, Ethel's small poems would fill an important volume of poetry.  I have always wondered why she isn't among the most famous poets in the country, although I am her husband and that maybe makes me prejudiced.  Still, I also have an academic background in English and American literature and am also a poet, so I have the right to think what I think.

2 Comments

Filed under Essays, Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

January 27, 2026 · 7:39 am

Ethel’s Birthday

May the poetry and art and wonder of who she is continue to flow over the years!

2 Comments

Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Photography

Tagged as , , , ,

January 9, 2026 · 3:10 pm

Audio Book: Meditations on Ceremonies of Beginnings

Tribal College Press has just released an audiobook version of my book of narrative poetry called Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings.

According to a review by someone I have never met on amazon, Thomas Cannon, “Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings is both intensely local and powerfully global. The tribal college and world indigenous higher education movement described in these poems have their roots and growth in Wisconsin, home of poet Thomas Davis, as well as in many other places, including Minnesota, South Dakota, Hawaii, and New Zealand. The poems are set in many of these places, often at meetings of leaders in the movement. I enjoyed this collection of poems dealing with the early days of the Tribal College Movement.
“The Tribal College Movement is an important part of history and has a big impact today. This history is interesting in itself, but Davis brings it to life by sharing in poems. In this way, he brings together biographical information about the people involved, the implications of the movement, and the culture this movement takes place in.” sd

As is true of all movements, time is the great erasure, and unless the people and events of a movement during its starting years are written about and captured in real time, much that should be available for both contemporary and future generations is lost. I hope that those who read or listen to this book will

I spent weeks recording the poems and text at home in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, doing my best to provide Tribal College Press with as clean a recording as possible. Then the press went through an extensive editing process to clean up the technical challenges with my work so that the book could be published by Audible. My grandson Will helped me by making sure I got the right equipment to do the recording. He earned a degree from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in music and sound engineering.

The tribal college movement is one of the most significant education movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The difference it has made in tribal lives throughout the United States is profound and long-lasting, helping to create and maintain both an economic and artistic renaissance throughout Indian country.

I hope that those who listen or read this book will be entertained by the stories, enlightened by the wisdom of Native voices, and learn about the miracle of both the tribal college and universities movement in the United States and the world indigenous higher education movement worldwide. Imbedded in these movements, in my opinion, is part of the hope of a world that sometimes seems way too dark and foreboding.

The art on the cover was done by Ethel Mortenson Davis

Leave a comment

Filed under Art by Ethel Mortenson Davis, Essays, poems, Poetry, Published Books, Thomas Davis

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,

October 26, 2025 · 4:20 pm

Fall Colors in Potowatomi 2025

Photos by Ethel Mortenson Davis

Leave a comment

Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Photography, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , ,

August 4, 2025 · 9:37 am

Hummingbirds in New Mexico

When we lived in Continental Divide, New Mexico, one of the many glories of the area where we lived at the foot of the Zuni Mountains were the great hummingbirds that were in the area from spring to fall. Sometimes in the pinion trees outside our house, hundreds of hummingbirds gathered and then dive bombed, perched, and hovered around the red feeders that Ethel filled multiple times a day. Gold, green, brown, and red flashed in the special New Mexico light as a celebration of life and living darted here and there all over our yard and into the field where horses were grazing out the back window. Sometimes Ethel would go out to water the wildflower garden she kept going until winter set in through the hottest of summer days. The hummingbirds didn’t seem to have any fear of her, but buzzed within inches of her head as they dipped in and out of the spraying water. The high desert is so dry so much of the year, and you would think that life had to have an almost impossible time surviving. Yet, the hummingbirds, beautiful and raucous, were only part of what was present in this unbelievably beautiful place with its small mountains and soaring red cliffs. Birds, elk, mountain lions, mule deer, antelope, jack rabbits, and a host of other life survived among the pinion and juniper forests that spread out over the land. Sometimes we’d even have a stellar jay landing beneath our apple trees, its dramatic crown and blue fire startling as it strutted in the small shade. This was hummingbird heaven–a place where we could sit in our living room as a fiery sunrise blazed on the eastern horizon and watched dawn glint off hummingbird wings.

3 Comments

Filed under Essays, Ethel Mortenson Davis, Photography, Thomas Davis

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

July 27, 2025 · 10:07 am

I was amazed

by Thomas Davis

At the Door County Published Author Book Fair last weekend, I was amazed. Four different people came up and told me that In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams was the best book they have ever read. One person told me that The Prophecy of the Wolf was their favorite book. Ethel’s new book, The Woman and the Whale, was also popular, especially with her pastel on the cover, and, I suspect, outsold any other poetry book at the fair.

I remember spending so many years writing and writing and having absolutely no luck at all. If either Ethel and I had sold five books at that point in our lives, we would have been so excited that we would have probably floated into the air and shined more brightly than the sun. These days those days seem like a distant past, but this blog was established partially because we both wanted readers. Our beloved son Kevin (Alazanto) Davis had died, and we felt lost in a bewilderment of emotions. When we started getting readers and then more readers, some as eminent as John Looker, the wonderful English poet, we started to believe in our writing with more optimism in our spirits.

Both of us have always written from childhood on. Ethel’s art and poetry has always been a magic part of who she is. I published my first poem in The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction, Colorado during my first year at Mesa College. With Richard Brenneman, I had also helped put together a small poetry journal in Grand Junction called The Rimrock Poets Magazine that included work by Ethel. Sometimes during those years, a poem would appear in a literary journal or magazine, but those were rare, rather than common instances, even though Ethel was, and clearly is, a major, major talent as a poet.

Not long after founding this blog, Ethel decided we would publish her first book using the new ability to self publish. I Sleep Between the Moons of New Mexico was quickly followed up by White Ermine Across Her Shoulders. I kept trying to get published with little success until I wrote the epic poem, The Weirding Storm (a book that I still think is perhaps some of my best writing), which was published by Bennison Press in Great Britain. By then our blogging friend, John Looker, had introduced me to Bennison Press, and I took a wild chance and sent the manuscript to Deborah Bennison, the publisher.

I love selling books to people person to person at book fairs and book events at book stores and other places. I suspect my father’s spirit gave me that love when he had us boys work at the grocery store he and my mother ran for all the years we were at home. I wish I had some skill at marketing beyond that skill. Still, these days I feel like I have arrived as a writer, especially in the Sturgeon Bay area where we now live and the part of New Mexico where we used to live. What a wonderful joy that has become in my life.

Leave a comment

Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

June 16, 2025 · 9:29 am

James Janko Review Ethel Mortenson Davis’s Newest Book, The Woman and the Whale

James Janko is one of the most significant authors in the United States. His newest novel, Wired, is on pre-order now. I’ve ordered it. When he wrote to me telling me that he thought Ethel was one of the most important poets in the world, he directed me to a review he’d written about her latest book of Poetry, The Woman and the Whale. I couldn’t agree with him more. I think a superb writer recognizes superb writing and is a wonderful judge of what he reads.

1 Comment

Filed under Essays, Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry

Tagged as , , , , , , ,