Bitch Goddess Poetics

Stella Vine, "Sylvia Plath" (2004)

Bitch Goddess Poetics
__________________

“The Erection—
of the Myth of
the Bitch Goddess
or Evil Double”
—Edward Butscher
Sylvia Plath: Method
and Madness
_______________________

Bitchy Poetics

“What Alvarez has not
seen is Sylvia’s love for
double entendres her
belief that the bitch
goddess was male in
her drive for power”
—Edward Butscher
Sylvia Plath: Method
and Madness
___________

A big mistake—
By the Alvarez literati
Not helping Sylvia connect
More to her Bitchy side

Her hotline el primitivo—
Wired to her unconsciousness
Her great struggles with
Both kunt & dick poetics

Instinctual energies-
Hardly Modernist mauve
Hardly Alvarez allusive
Sylvia’s Arielesque Artemis

Sylvia was butchy—
New England bitchy
Sapphic Modernist
Huntress extraordinaire

Thought Fuck

“the masculine urge
of her bitch goddess
who wanted power
and could possibly
conceive of another
woman as sex object”
—Edward Butscher
Sylvia Plath: Method
and Madness
_______________

The stars stand still—
Clocks stop ticking and
The page is burning

Sylvia doesn’t think—
She’s taken over more by
Bitch Goddess Sisterhood

Her unwritten Self—
By Muse physical shock
Possessed prematurely

American fugue—
Sickened by Tulips
And crude Electro-Shock

Jaguar Jugular

“Sylvia is playing
with a kind of horror
motif that must have
tickled the imprisoned
bitch goddess to laughter,
sardonic or otherwise”
—Edward Butscher
Sylvia Plath: Method
and Madness
_________________

Terrifying her sleek—
Thighs, naked appetite
Coiled spring of death

She hunts men—
For their animal vitality
Sucking them dry

Pussy poetess—
British Bitch Goddess
Violent vulva vixen

Pike, pigs, panthers—
She’s carnal & carnivorous
Goes for his jugular vein

The Wound

“What was behind Sylvia’s
awesome fertility of the
moment? Something was
nagging at her unconscious,
stirring up the dark waters
where the bitch goddess
had her nest, Ted was
drifting away and her
marriage was about to
collapse.”—Edward Butscher
Sylvia Plath: Method
and Madness
_______________

Wounded by denial—
Queered by sublimation
Sick of str8t domination

Ted was her trophy—
All the other priestesses
Pouted like Dido Merwin

Face lifts got rid of—
All those years of wrinkly
Dido wanted Ted desperately

But there’s no way—
Of disguising the truth
Dido’s pussy just wasn’t
Young & supple anymore!

Stella Vine, "Sylvia Plath" (2004)

Against Confession

“The bitch goddess
was repressed as she
had never been before
by the young wife
enjoying the advantages
of her new role and the
pleasures of a shared
future.”—Edward Butscher
Sylvia Plath: Method
and Madness
________________

Avoiding the direct—
Autobiographical method
Sylvia the Bitch Goddess
Did things differently

She let her poems—
Emerge slowly from
The Solar Midnight
Of her Swollen Pussy

She kept things—
In the dark, unseen
She wrote violently
Letting others pout

Her pussy’s got—
An Animal mind that
Males fear in their
Slithery Snakehood

The Snake’s Stain

“Art will endure—
including Sylvia’s own
poetry—the bitch goddess
myth—despite the death
of the other self, the
flesh-and-blood mother,
the sacrificial lamb, a
woman killed by a male
reality and culture.”
—Edward Butscher
Sylvia Plath: Method
and Madness
___________________

Sylvia’s anxiety—
Wasn’t like Ted’s
With his Pike idols
And Jaguar myths

Being Bitch Goddess—
Her precocious prick
Powerful pussy worry
Worse than Ted’s

What was it that—
Stained Court Green
Late at night by
The old Cemetery?

Sniffing, smelling—
The primal stink and
Stench of Ted’s 12”
Traumatic monster?

Faber and Faber

“Sylvia translating the
bitch goddess into artifice
and defining her terrors
in terms of Hiroshima
and Auschwitz”
—Edward Butscher
Sylvia Plath: Method
and Madness
__________________

Viciousness in the—
Faber & Faber stairwell
Miss Eliot and all her
Queer cronies gathered

Miss Auden with her—
Reptilian wrinkled neck
Leering at Ted’s crotch
Over his tipsy martini

Silly queen Miss Spender—
Slipping & sliding against
The staircase banister
Wanting to woe Ted too

Miss MacNeice niggardly—
Sipping her drink as well
Ted despising this bunch
Of effete British Fags

Fertility Goddess

“The bitch goddess
was permitted to say
all the things she had
wanted to say but
could not when
restrained by love
and middle-class
morality.”
—Edward Butscher
Sylvia Plath: Method
and Madness
___________________

What else can eunuchs—
And kept men of louche
And decadent Waste Land
Do but leer and lust?

Getting their hands on—
The Male Modernist moment
Gripping the newborn baby
Concealed in Hughes’ crotch?

Despite their cool—
Aloof Effacement of the
Zoo keeper’s wife hissing
There back home alone

Madame Sosostris—
Had already predicted
Thru Tarot and Ouija
The Waste Land poets

Stella Vine, "Sylvia Plath" (2004)

Medusa

“Medusa herself had
been a prime archetype
for Sylvia’s urge to freeze
experience in poetry.”
—Edward Butscher
Sylvia Plath: Method
and Madness
__________________

Sylvia writes for herself—
In this incarnation she’s discovered
The intoxication of Ariel’s power

The millennium’s sad clichés—
Attending to Yeats’ descending
Decadent Bethlehem visions

She admires Rimbaud—
Letting herself planning to translate
Herself anew back in American

Arielesque her new nom de plume—
Burns brightly there on Fitzroy with
Her new Bitch Goddess poetry

Bitch Goddess Poetry

“Ted’s abandonment,
the end of her marriage,
had freed her to become
the bitch goddess”
—Edward Butscher
Sylvia Plath: Method
and Madness
___________________

A petulant stubborn dizzy kiss—
Sickened by Tulips & Electro-Shock
Every poem a meathead manifesto

Larkin calling me in his cold way—
A “Hammer Film poet” who learned
How to play crazy…all the way

You know, like Miss Lowell & Sexton—
Curiously hurried with offhand vignettes
Seemingly too personal to be practiced

Shockingly chic yet somehow sad—
A yolk lace or noose of silk kimono pose
Ravishing, choking, strangling me