Betty Buchsbaum

I’ve always been a writer but, of poems, a very private writer. I’ve not hesitated to share, informally and through publication, essays and articles about ideas and other people’s poems. But to open my inner life to public scrutiny, to feel that I could shape my perceptions and speak in a voice that might matter to others, to quiet that jeering chant in my head all about you so narcissistic and is it art?—that liberation has taken place primarily over the last 15 years.

As a child, propped up in bed, sick but not too sick, along with the comfort of homemade rice pudding (never could understand why A.A. Milne’s “Mary Jane” didn't like it) I'd write poems in a notebook—wide lines, red margin and a black and white speckled hard cover. No one in my family ever asked to see what I wrote and I never thought to share my writing. I wrote solely for my own pleasure just as at summer camp I’d walk alone in the woods singing my own tunes, making up my own words. A pleasure separate from being judged and trying to pass my life with honors to win my father’s praise.

I don’t know what happened to those notebooks, don’t recall what I wrote about, though I seem to remember lots of birds and flowers. I do know decades passed before I could write what I didn't always know I needed to say and in a voice from deep within. The arrival of my first grandchild helped generate my late-in-life birth of poems. Along the way I've been emboldened by women poets unafraid to go public about very private matters, undeterred by traditional putdowns of ‘female’ subjects, themes as fundamental as our relationships with each other.

Still, I struggle with holding my inner world up for view and judgment as art. About 15 years ago I started sending out poems to journals. An acceptance made me nervous; what if family read these intimate poems? Yet after too many terse rejection slips, I stopped submitting poems for long periods. In putting this book The Love Word together, I often felt paralyzed, staring at multiple versions of a poem on my computer. Were any good enough to be it? What about the diction in the third line, the metaphor (or lack of one) at the end? Even after I told myself okay, here’s the best you can do for this poem as of now, I had a hard time pressing the print key, my finger resisting my own good sense.

Finally, in the process of arranging these poems in a manuscript, I kept wondering: do these poems hold together as a book, and one that others will connect to? Fortunately, at all these stages I did not have to muddle along alone, thanks to close poet friends, to my husband and children, to my publisher and editor who all believed in getting my work between the covers of a book. Yes, it both excites and frightens me to have these poems out in the world, and in one place I can hold in my hands. But apart from all the emotions around publication, I am grateful that my writing is so integral to living. I need to write: my life feeds my poems; my poems reveal and deepen my life.

© 2004 Betty Buchsbaum

My Sister’s Genius
The Long View
Moving through Checkout

© 2004 Chicory Blue Press All rights reserved