Selection from The Collected Works of Billy The Kid by Michael Ondaatje
After shooting Gregory
this is what happened
I'd shot him well and careful
made it explode under his heart
so it wouldn't last long and
was about to walk away
when this chicken paddles out to him
and as he was falling hops on his neck
digs the beak into his throat
straightens legs and heaves
a red and blue vein out
Meanwhile he fell
and the chicken walked away
still tugging at the vein
till it was 12 yards long
as if it held that body like a kite
Gregory's last words being
get away from me yer stupid chicken
Michael Ondaatje, from The Collected Works of Billy The Kid
Comments
written drunk
the poetry of rocks and cartoons
Which poets are you reading?
Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, William Shakespeare, Elvis Costello.
Maybe, Lucy, what I meant by cartoonlike is trying to have effect rather than trying to say something. It is a category of pseudoartistic effort that is very common among the young. The reaction many young people have to 'cool' poetry, and to other things that are more pseudo than art - is that they say 'cool'. But cannot say what was there. Think of the quintessential piece of cool pseudo art for the young - the Matrix movies. Cartoonlike in that reality is completely replaced by abandonment, made marketable by special effects. Anvils on the head instead of ideas in them.
I will agree with you that Ondaatje is a good writer, even brilliant. But is this stuff expressing anything? Or is it manipulative fantasy for nothing more than fun?
love
m
If you read the book, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, some of the poems are expressing a beauty in the natural world. This poem is brutal, but the world Billy lived in was brutal. This art form is called fictional poetry and has a long tradition.
As for form. I think this type of disjointed style can get to deeper, less-polished, truths. I would call the Imagists the forefathers and foremothers of this style.
Thanks for weighing in, though I really was not expecting, the merits of the poem to be debated.
Lucy, who knows that Beethoven's contemporaries must have descried his loud and chaotic style at the beginning.
I didn't say, Lucy that the poets I was reading were favorites. Just that I was reading them.
What signaled to me that the Billy poem was cheap/cartoonlike was NOT the form. Not the shock. Not the voice. Not that it was loud or chaotic or iconoclastic. Not the fact that it fits into a body of stuff that has a name. What signaled to me that it was cheap/cartoonlike was its lack of substance. Beethoven may have been objected to, but not for not having substance.
Is it strange (like ... chaotic???) that people comment on a poem submitted in a forum designed to get people to talk to each other?
Did the poem offend your sensibilities? I find I have to sit with something at times and decide where my objection to a work comes from.
Debate is welcome. I'm just surprised to see a published and established writer's work being called "cartoon-ish." I think I could say the same about Edmund Spencer, an established Renaissance writer. We all have those established writers, whose work seems without merit to us.
Yes, thank you for the debate.