More information available at www.nancyscott.net
By John Dunphy, Managing Editor
She has written about drug-addled youth, injustices taking place in our own backyard and why she would never want to be a landlord in Trenton.
Yet, for Copperfield Drive resident Nancy Scott, the poems she weaves from both what she has seen in the news and experienced firsthand during her many years as a state employee helping the underprivileged, are far cries from her fortunate origins.
”Not having a place to live never crossed my radar growing up,” said Ms. Scott, who moved to Princeton from New York City in 1966, then to Lawrence Township in 1994. Ms. Scott tells the tales of people she has met along the way, as well as her own youth, in “Down to the Quick,” her debut collection of poetry released earlier last year through Plain View Press.
While Ms. Scott had tried her hand at fiction writing in the early 1980s, it wasn’t until over a decade later that she gave poetry a turn.
”I had a children’s novel I was having trouble finding a publisher for,” she said. “I thought if I wrote it in narrative poetry form, it may have a better chance.”
But, instead of continuing in the children’s fiction tack, Ms. Scott found that poetry had piqued her interest. But, what to write about?
”I had a backlog of stories people had told me in the work I was doing,” said Ms. Scott, a former caseworker for the Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS) who later worked 18 years with the Section 8 rental assistance program, covering Mercer, Somerset and Middlesex counties.
”I had hundreds of people I spoke to over that period of time,” she added.
Ms. Scott invested in her work more personally when she started an organization to recruit families for interracial adoption, which was still taboo in the 1960s. She and her now ex-husband, who had one biological son, adopted three interracial children.
Starting in 1980 and for about seven years, Ms. Scott began taking foster children into her home that were still in the DYFS waiting room after the office closed. “Mostly teens. Some of the poems in the book reflect some of those kids,” she said.
Two of those teens, George and Balfour, are discussed at length in “Boot Camp,” the second suite of poems in “Down to the Quick.”
Georgie, who had grown up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn, had been a friend of one of Ms. Scott’s daughters. “He was a nice kid, he just had a really lousy upbringing.”
In “The Shearling,” Ms. Scott writes: “Georgie’s mom turned him out, a skinny five-year-old, to steal. The welfare check and what men paid her went for angel dust.”
”At first he lifted, bread, cigarettes, gummy bears, packs of franks … By fourteen, Georgie was out the door faster than imagination, his girdle lined with CD’s, Nike sneakers, Polo cologne, anything he could load in an outsized backpack, sell behind school bleachers.”
Balfour had been a friend of Ms. Scott’s children. “We were aware of his home situation. So, we went over to his house one day and asked if he could come and live with us, which he did for several years,” she said.
His fate is touched upon in the poems “When Balfour Calls” and “Whatever Happened to Ten Young Black Men from New Jersey.”
”Balfour lived with us after his father threatened to kill him with a machete,” Ms. Scott writes. “He’s been in and out of jail and rehab for the past ten years. I pray he’s all right but dread the next phone call.”
The poetry also examines local events in dramatized form, such as “Why I Never Want to Be a Trenton Landlord.”
”On the 20 minute ride down I-95, he remembers he forgot smoke alarm batteries again,” Ms. Scott writes. “Finds walls outside 2B peppered with bullets, ceiling light filaments still screwed in the sockets.”
Ms. Scott touches lightly upon her life before her work with the state and her adopted children in poems like “The Good Humor Man, 1960,” where she discusses a friend’s complaints about a beau. “She complains he brings her torpedo pops or almond crunch bars when what she wants is red roses. (or maybe it’s because he’s got six toes on each foot.)”
However, it is the author’s extensive experience in DYFS and Section 8 that serves as the highlight of her collection.
Despite her many years helping those less fortunate, Ms. Scott assertively stated, “I think I would have changed everything.”
”Having done all that, and the enormous amount of energy it took to keep going, I would have tried something entirely different,” she said. “It was a long haul for a lot of years. You just feel a responsibility and it’s hard giving it up.”
Even after retiring from her work with the Section 8 program in 2004, Ms. Scott still found it difficult to cut all ties, signing on to the AmeriCorps Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) program, as well as working with the Mercer Alliance to End Homelessness.
Today, Ms. Scott fills her time through small jobs in her other field of design research, as well as editor of U.S. 1 Worksheets, the journal of the U.S. 1 poets cooperative. She said there are a lot of tales left in her backlog, and expects to begin work on her second book of poetry soon. While her own life had been one of relative fortune and ease, her work was in service to those who never had it that easy. Ms. Scott hopes to tell the stories of those who have either pulled themselves from the wreckage and those that were not so fortunate.
”What I see in some of these people I knew were enormous survival skills,” she said. “You can’t imagine what it’s like to survive on the streets, in welfare or raising six kids and you’re 26 years old. I was amazed that people every day were dealing with survival that I never had to deal with.”
”They didn’t always do it according to the book, but they always found a way,” Ms. Scott added.
For more information about Nancy Scott and “Down to the Quick,” visit www.nancyscott.net.

