S=Y=L=V=I=A

THE BITCH GODDESS

“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 

___________

A big mistake—

By the Alvarez literati

Not helping Sylvia connect

More to her Butchy side

Her hotline el primitivo—

Wired to her unconsciousness

Her great struggles with

Both Phallocentric Poetics

Instinctual energies—

Hardly Mauve & Miss Mince

Hardly Alvarez allusive

Sylvia’s Arielesque Artemis

Sylvia was butchy—

New England bitchy too

Sapphic Lesbos Moderne

Huntress extraordinaire

Dyke 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 
_______________

The stars stand still—

Clocks stop ticking and

The page burns, my dear

Str8t Male Critics don’t wanna—

Think that the Bitch Goddess

Was really a Closeted Dyke

Her unwritten Self—

Bitch Goddess Sisterhood

Possessed prematurely

American fugue—

Sickened by male 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 

_________________

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 

_______________

Wounded by denial—

Queered by sublimation

Sick of str8t domination

Ted was her trophy—

All the other priestesses

Pouting like Dido Merwin

Face lifts got rid of—

All those wrinkly marriages

Dido wanted Ted desperately

But there’s no way—

Of disguising the truth

Dido’s pussy just wasn’t

Young & supple anymore!

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 

________________

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 possessed—

An Animal mind that

Males feared 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 

___________________

Sylvia’s anxiety—

Wasn’t like Ted’s

With his Pike ideology

And Mytholmroyd myths

Being Bitch Goddess—

Her precocious dyke

Powerful pussy worry

Worse than Ted’s

What was it that—

Stained Court Green

Late at night by that

Old rotting Cemetery?

Sniffing, smelling—

The primal stink and

Stench of all those

Dear Dead Pussies?

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 

__________________

Viciousness in the—

Faber & Faber stairwell

Miss Eliot & her gang of

Queer cronies gathered

Miss Auden with her—

Reptilian wrinkled neck

Leering at Ted’s crotch

Over his tipsy martini

Silly Miss Spender—

Slipping & sliding against

The staircase banister

Wanting to woo Ted too

Miss MacNeice niggardly—

Sipping her drink while

Ted glared at 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 

___________________

What else could eunuchs—

And kept men of the 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

Sylvia’s Waste Land revenge

Medusa

“Medusa herself had

been a prime archetype

for Sylvia’s urge to freeze

experience in poetry.”

—Edward Butscher

Sylvia Plath: Method 

__________________

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 into

Decadent Bethlehem visions

She admires Yeats immensely—

Letting herself go to gyre & slouch her

Way anew into the awful Vision

Arielesque her new nom de plume—

Burning brightly there on Fitzroy Road

Her new Bitch Goddess persona

Bitch Goddess Plans Unfolding

“Ted’s abandonment,

the end of her marriage,

had freed her to become

the bitch goddess”

—Edward Butscher

Sylvia Plath: Method 

___________________

A petulant stubborn dizzy Life—

Sickened by Tulips & Electro-Shock

Every poem a meathead manifesto

Larkin calling her in his cold way—

A “Hammer Film poet” who learned

Like Berryman how to jump off a bridge?

You know, like Miss Lowell & Sexton—

Curiously hurried with offhand vignettes

Seemingly too personal to be practical

Shockingly chic yet somehow closeted—

A yolk lace or noose of silk kimono pose

Ravishing, choking, strangling her to death?