___________________________
BITCH GODDESS MURDER CASE
“The danger was not that she
would lose control or surrender
to the impulses of the raging
bitch goddess within herself
but that the stiff outward
features would become
recognizable as parts of a mask.”
—Edward Butscher, Sylvia Plath
Method and Madness
____________
The Murder Trial
After Ted & Assia Wevill—
Got put away for life having
Attempted murder most foul!!!
What could the Queen—
Possibly do to mitigate the
Horrible Public Relations fiasco?
____________
The simply filthy Tabloids—
Were full of trashy tacky Scandal
The American press even worse!
“SEX!!! SLEAZE!!! SCANDAL!!!—
The embarrassing Headlines blared
The National Enquirer screamed
____________
Ted and Assia so rudely dead—
No need for the Tower of London
Garbage washing into sluggish Thames
Trashy Poet Laureate
Parliament was pissed off—
The House of Lords all paunchy
And periwigged tres aghast!!!
Prince Philip smirked—
“Let the Bourgeois Apocalypse
Finally fucking begin!!!”
_______________
Only one Solution was possible—
Silencing Scandal by taking back
The Royal “Order of Merit”!!!
Awarding Sylvia Plath—
The grand Poet Laureateship
Assuaging her Killer Victim Fame!!!
Plath Reborn
"It
was only when she gave up
that
effort to 'get outside' herself,
and
finally accepted the fact that
her
painful subjectivity was her
real
theme, and that the plunge
into
herself was her only real
direction…that
she suddenly
found
herself in full possession
of
her genius"—Ted Hughes,
Introduction, Johnny
Panic
and the Bible of Dreams
______________
Arbitrary
surreal symbols—
Plath's
Ariel poems rather
Overly
impassioned and too
Rosenberg
electroshockette
Sylvia’s
surreal shorthand—
Actually
impassioned fast
Reorganizations
of the quickie
Relevant
obvious facts
________________
Sylvia
gave up trying—
To
get outside herself
And
finally accepted her
Sleek
Sappho modernism
But
she had to make up—
A
quick shorthand jumping
In
& out of her Johnny Panic
Closet
of Dreary Dreams
__________
Miss
Yeats suggesting—
There
in the Fitzroy maisonette
The
sleek Arielesque racehorse
Guiding
her terrible sleek Tercets
After the Reading
“the heavy hammy
American cheap slang”
—Sylvia Plath
The Unabridged Journals
May 19m 1958
______________
She had the bitch itch—
Caught between two worlds
One dead and the other
Powerless to be born
Like some vulgar rejection—
From Ladies’ Home Journal
So humiliating the way
They questioned her Style
__________________
Who knows what her—
Poetry would’ve been like
Instead of the usual str8t
Male Waste Land stuff?
Buried down there in—
St.Thomas'
Churchyard,
Heptonstall,
West Yorkshire
With all the dead dears
________________
And then there was—
Olwyn all snail-faced
And ashamed of herself
Covering up for her brother
And then there was—
That heavy British male
Jocularity one sees in
The Sulky spoiled Isles
______________
Smelly with their own—
Inner corruption and
Greasy unkempt hair
Picking their noses
Anglo-Saxon history—
Corruption, crimes and
Unctuous schmooze
So what else is new?
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