Seth's the Golden Gate -- Essay

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After the advertisement is placed, then Liz, a lawyer, enters into the picture and poetry of John's life. Liz Donati attracts John by writing him two sonnets, and of course, the use of a personal advertisement as a meeting place provides even more evidence of how individuals still connect, even in the sterile and technical modern world, through prose. Even the most prosaic individuals such as Liz and John find ways to express their lust and then their love in the form of a verbally astute dance.

The other couple that dominates the text is Liz's brother, Ed. Ed is gay and is involved with John's old college roommate, Phil. The conflicts created by homosexuality destroy Ed and Phil's tryst, making their coupling in poetic terms the more traditional of the two that are depicted in the Golden Gate, in terms of the sonnet medium's frequent depiction of unhappy lovers as pulled together by force of character, but pulled apart by faith, family, and societal obligations. Ed pens to Phil: "I have to trust my faith's decisions, / Not batten on my own volitions." Politics and conflicts over animal husbandry pull John and Liz apart, more humorously than tragically.

The fact that religion and politics dominate the sonnets highlight the rational aspect of the sonnet's constrained form as well as the sonnet sequence's prosaic aspects, as it narrates a romantic plot. The presence of the characters falling in and out of love in a 'real' structure of written poetry, however, also shows the 'written' quality of the sonnets, another typical aspect of the form's immediacy.

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Like the modern lovers, and Seth's literary sonnet-writing predecessors, the conceit of the sonnet is that sonnets are written 'in the moment,' and then suddenly and subsequently delivered. Sonnets are not like a ballad, a poem that merely talks about character's outer lives, a sonnet is both of the inner character's love, as well as is driven by the outer actions of the characters in the form of writing.

It might be objected that such a plot driven novel, even in sonnet form, could hardly tell the reader much about the real author's inner life -- after all, unlike the authors previously mentioned, Seth is not falling in love, merely adopting a persona. However, Seth occasionally makes an entrance into the plot, highlighting with a postmodern and self-referential quality, his own quixotic project, to bring poetry in verse back into mainstream literary life. He depicts himself bumping into an editor at a literary get-together. When he describes his novel in verse, the novel the reader holds in his or her hands, the editor is said to sniff, 'How marvelously quaint,' he said, / and subsequently cut me dead." Yet even though this incident highlights the fictive quality of the prosaic novel of Liz, Jon, Ed, and Phil, it also shows how their strivings of Seth to put their lives and competing thoughts into poetry is both vital, necessary, and quite 'real' in its own way.

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