Nancy Takacs was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, and spent summers working in a Manhattan department store while going to college, starting out as a watercolorist also interested in fashion design and song-writing. She discovered poetry in a creative writing class at Jersey City State College, and went on to attend the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, earning an MFA in Poetry. Living on her husband’s family’s farm/wild-life refuge in Ohio, she felt a strong connection to it, and began writing about it, before moving in 1983 to Carbon County, Utah, where she still lives and continues to be drawn to nature and the outdoors.
Author of several books of poems, Nancy is an emerita professor at USU Eastern/CEU. She teaches poetry workshops privately and for communities of writers. She began a Memory Café in 2019 for poetry lovers who have memory loss, and for several years has taught a weekly poetry workshop to poets of all ages, at the Carbon County Senior Center. She is currently the inaugural Poet Laureate of Helper City, Utah.
The Worrier poems received the 2016 Juniper Prize for Poetry, the 2018 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Blue Patina was awarded the 2016 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry. The recipient of a 2020 Pushcart Prize, for her poem “Dearest Water,” she has received the 2016 runner-up award for the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, Weber’s Sherwin Howard Award for Poetry, the Nation/Discovery Award, awards from the UAC’s Original Writing Competition, and two writing fellowships from Ucross. For many years, she was a UAC Artist-in-the-schools and taught poetry to students, as well as to inmates in the Gunnison, Utah, correctional facility.
Nancy continues to host writers and create poetry events in Spring Glen and Helper through the Steamboat Mountain Readers/Workshop Series, and through her new laureateship. She lives in Wellington, Utah, with her husband poet Jan Minich, and spends time in Bayfield, Wisconsin, near Lake Superior. Their son, Ian Minich, is an alternative-methods photographer in Salt Lake City.
Works
Blue Universe
Blue Universe
Name the sky a pale turquoise
behind the pencil lace of pitch-black trees,
name this sculpture cerulean –
woman with a garnet heart, hair of pinyon,
wiry antlers, fingertips of leaves. Name
the mountain lion opal-blue, whose desert
will become the City of the Future,
and the black-bear royal blue
as she looks down to a racket of hounds,
a gun. Watch early butterflies,
small-blues, skim the violet mustard
that is one day nothing, the next, streaming
through weed-yards, roadsides, and
inhale its musky breath. Watch desert clouds
trail off like denim work shirts of miners
in the dawn-blue, gathering for another
day of darkness, lungs spattered with dust.
Call this computer screen periwinkle. Banish
its clarity for earthy oxide rubbed
from the pigments of robin’s eggs, larkspur.
Listen to the jay’s whisper song,
water notes like a call from childhood,
and to the next-door shepherd’s howl
before the train, azure in his throat.
See the sky go lighter on its way
into the atmosphere, a casual blue
so light it’s almost not there over another
Sunday with coffee and plum blossoms,
a drive to the desert and juniper berries
whose gin you crush and rub behind your ear.
Let this day be just another that Earth tilts
on its axis, as you wait for the lazuli
buntings, who always arrive in May
to your feeder in their colors of Baja.
Believe the blue universe is what you live for,
need memory for, take up tools and draw
a new mandala for, sketch with colors
you desperately love more than anything,
a hyacinth so unforgettable, an iris so present,
they can tattoo your palm. Name the branches
of ink in your veins as you say my day is done,
as the world comes down on all of us,
and we feel it as it falls, looking at dusk,
the wane of its sky, the light that we felt
all day on our shoulders, our packs
our arms, and our hair. Turn to the holy indigo
of night that remembers us to the owl
and the coyote, the raccoon and the nighthawk,
midnight that will piece us whole again, with
these wishes we carry, each of us, in our orbit,
before the light comes back to us, and we rise.
The Worrier
The Worrier
silent film star
Now that you are her, what will you do?
I’ll walk across the swinging bridge
and light a clove cigarette.
How will you roam?
I’ll drive a Packard convertible,
my man in a long dark coat beside me.
In the countryside, where will you land, and what will you eat?
We’ll find a bar in northern Wisconsin.
We won’t eat.
What are you wearing, and what do you look like?
An indigo dress, a little black cloche.
I’ve outlined my lips
to look like a sweet maroon bow.
What songs will you sing?
“Heart of My Heart”
and “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard.”
Who will know you better than anyone?
My silk chemise.
What undergarments do you wear?
None.
What tree do you wear instead?
The plum.
Why?
Because it’s a palm full of dusk.
What word will you use?
Flagrant. It’s time for this.
Where does the word go?
It rises from my bare feet when I leave the beach.
What is strange about you now?
There is nothing strange.
What is common?
I have loved the first light.
Where does the light go?
It goes under the letters in captions of what I say.
Where does the scent go?
It goes into my eyes, my mouth, the way I turn my head
so that you will imagine lilacs.
Initially published in Tampa Review; and in The Worrier Poems, University of Massachusetts Press, 2017
Heavy Weather
Heavy Weather
in breathless hats,
in second-hand seas,
through meticulous labyrinths
of goopy news,
in colliding bagels,
and bleary olives,
over books half-gnawed
by cocker spaniels,
in aroused denim
and long-sleeved music,
with senior cranberries
and ageless teas,
in miraculous tales,
in marathon warnings,
in gaping gardens,
in the absent bees.
Initially published in American Journal of Poetry
Echo the River Guide
Echo the River Guide
When I spoke words, they were
awnings of balsam, bathing
the woods in a psychedelic show.
They were the apple orchard melting
into the bleat of wild orchid,
the staccato razz of squirrels.
They were simple, carried out to the point of rapture,
dropping seeds
to plant on the fig of my tongue.
I was the chord of the chrysalis,
the pupa, the wings. I was
the swarm, humming in the deepest well.
The words swirled like petals
on a dark pool, spinning
to a tiny coast of fool’s gold.
I needed a voice, and the voice was there,
never telling on the bear.
There were rolls of words, Life Savers
splitting out of their silver.
There were words that roared like rapids,
stung like nettles,
scenting the air with acres of sage.
They were fluorescent tents in a meadow,
sleeping bags like Crayola cocoons.
They were pistachios and laughter,
a Ouja board and eerie hums from us.
They were the orders I brayed when the raft
headed for Skull Hole,
my crew paddling in unison to ride its lip
in amethyst shadow.
They were the wild charts I sang
to cross the shallow reef
when I took the kayak out alone.
Initially published in Red Voice, Finishing Line Press, 2016
Bibliography
- The Worrier poems, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 2017
- Red Voice, Finishing Line Press (Georgetown, KY), 2016
- Blue Patina, Blue Begonia Press, 2015
- Juniper, Limberlost Press (Boise, ID), 2012
- Wild Animals, Outlaw Artists Press, 2008
- Preserves, City Art Press, 2004.
- Pale Blue Wings, Limberlost Press (Boise, ID), 2001.
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