Vikram Seth, Photo: OutlookIndia.com

Until two weeks ago, I hated anything that rhymed.

But wait! You say. Rhyming is what makes poetry poetry. Well, not really. Nevertheless, it’s important. Centuries of western literature depends on rhymes. So much of my poetic education took for granted rhymes, that for a long time it didn’t occur to me to take issue with it. But it’s one of those things: once you notice it, it’s the only thing you can notice. It reads like an anvil at the end of every line. You can’t help trying to find the line where the poet flubs it, or silently reject a line that’s clearly contorted for the sake of some contrived rhyme.

At least, that’s how I felt before I picked up “The Golden Gate.” For the past few weeks, I’ve been cruising through hundreds of pages of rhyme. And not just rhyme— sonnets in tetrameter (that is, dah DUH dah DUH dah DUH dah DUH without the Shakespearean final dah DUH). This is not only the content of the book, but the acknowledgements, the table of contents, and the about the author. What? It seems impossible. But it’s hard to resist when it reads so effortlessly, and when the opening storyline is about secretly submitting a personal ad on your lonely ex’s behalf. So imagine my delight when I read this (sonnet 4.33):

…Good night.” Ed fears to answer. Trembling,
He moves his hand across the space
—What terrifying miles—assembling
His courage, touches Philip’s face
And feels him tense up and go rigid.
“I’m sorry,” Ed says, in a frigid,
Half-choking voice, “I thought you might—
I didn’t mean—I mean—good night.”
Taught with a cataleptic tension
They lie, unspeaking. Phil thinks, “Why
Be so uptight? He’s a great guy.
I’ve never bothered with convention.
God! It’s a year that I’ve been chaste…,”
And puts his arm around Ed’s waist.

Um, hey now. Ed (a very religious, somewhat conflicted character) and Phil (a bisexual single father) go on to have a very sweet, very complicated relationship after this first night.

It turns out Vikram Seth, the author of this very unusual, surprisingly delightful book is openly bisexual himself. And as a native of India, this fact has given him a fair amount of attention, and positioned him as a kind of activist. In a 2006 interview in OutlookIndia.com, he said,

I don’t particularly like talking about these matters myself. I am a private person and I don’t feel my friends’ lives and my own should be part of the public’s right to know. But in a case like this where so much is at stake, where the happiness, at a conservative estimate, of 50 million people and their right not to be fearful or lonely and to be with the people whom they love is at issue, and the happiness of their families as well, then it really is incumbent on us to speak out.

Vikram Seth is all the more interesting because he appears as a conscious narrator in his own work. The ‘I’ that occasionally appears is not a narrating character, but the author himself, peeling back the veil and adding his two cents. It’s very unusual, but then again, most of this book is.

So for this week, in tribute to my recent change of heart regarding rhyme, here are some of Seth’s thoughts on form in his own words, excerpted from The Golden Gate.

5.2

Professor, publisher, and critic
Each voiced his doubts. I felt misplaced.
A writer is mere arthritic
Among these muscular Gods of Taste.
As for that sad blancmange, a poet—
The world is hard; he ought to know it.
Driveling in rhyme’s all very well;
The question is, does spittle sell?
Since staggering home in deep depression,
My will’s grown weak. My heart is sore.
My lyre is dumb. I have therefore
Convoked a morale-boosting session
With a few kind if doubtful friends
Who’ve asked me to explain my ends.

5.3

How do I justify this stanza?
These feminine rhymes? My wrinkled muse?
The whole passé extraveganza?
How can I (careless of time) use
The dusty bread molds of Onegin
In the brave bakery of Reagan?
The loaves will surely fail to rise
Or else go stale before my eyes.
The truth is, I can’t justify it.
But as no shroud of critical terms
Can save my corpse from boring worms,
I may as well have fun and try it.
If it works, good; and if not, well,
A theory won’t postpone its knell.

5.4

Why, asks a friend, attempt tetrameter?
Because it once was noble, yet
Capers before the proud pentameter,
Tyrant of English. I regret
To see this marvelous swift meter
Demean its heritage, and peter
Into mere Hudibrastic tricks,
Unapostolic knacks and knicks.
But why take all this quite so badly?
I would not, had I world and time
To wait for reason, rhythm, rhyme
To reassert themselves, but sadly
The time is not remost when I
Will not be here to wait. That’s why.