Free The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje Page B

somewhat like a valise containing the collected raw material for a collage. And so there followed another year of rewriting, refocusing, restructuring, and compressing all that material into some newly invented organic form that would contain the story. During the editing process scenes blended together, hooked together—just as much by juxtaposition of moods as by new, surprising narrative lines. One could leap from terror to a close-up of amoth in a bowl, but there had to be some unspoken or hidden link between the two moments—to do with language perhaps or some small spark in a lyric that would lead to conflagration in the prose sequence that followed. I learned everything about editing a haphazard structure in the time I spent choreographing and rebuilding
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.
    I attempted everything. I took a stanza and wrote it backwards and in one case I kept the result; I tried beginning the poem halfway through; I tested and rewrote the poems again and again until they felt indelible to me. Oddly enough, the prose I left almost as it came out in the first draft. The lines in the poems were gnarled, with each line reflecting up to the line above as much as to the line that followed, but the prose wandered as if unaware into strange rooms and imaginary landscapes and old memories, and I realised without quite knowing why that I wanted to keep that informality. Even now I am not sure if it is the poems that anchor the book in a mental reality or the prose that does so with its physical actuality.
    It was a strange time for me certainly, feeling partially blindfolded about what I was doing. After the strict editing of the individual pieces I became obsessed with the arcing of the story, its larger architecture, as opposed to the clash of juxtapositions or plot development. Dennis Lee was my editor at House of Anansi, and he would visit me in London, Ontario, where I had all the scenes on the floor so I could look down at the movement of it and alter it by simplifying or complicating the storyline. Dennis was crucial in shaping this mongrel work, especially by accepting the fact that it
was
a mongrel work and that we had to live with it and, more importantly, make it airtight. Later, when I brought forward the visuals I had always planned on using— “fictional” portraits, documentary photographs, as well as theneeded “white spaces” for the pauses in the story—it was the poet bpNichol who helped me pace the book with its silences and what was unsaid. “I send you a picture of Billy…”, which begins the book, in fact had an image of The Kid within the rectangle above the text until Barrie suggested I simply (or perversely) remove the image within it, and suddenly the footholds of the story became mysterious. It was the reader who would now need to provide the picture of Billy. Dennis Lee and Barrie Nichol, and Stan Bevington, who designed the book at Coach House Press, were my cohorts in the making of the book.
    It came out at first to a thundering silence. Then one day I walked into Coach House Press and found some of the printers and designers there listening to a tape that the Vancouver artist Roy Kiyooka had made of himself reading one of the prose sections in the book. As I listened I was for the first time shocked at the violence of it, almost scared of it. My God, was that written by me? It was in any case the first time I was objectively aware of what I had done. And I was also aware that those gnarled private meditations of Billy could make terrible sense when heard out loud, so that the emotions could be recognised by any stranger, not just by the author who had written them.
    Michael Ondaatje, 2008

*
    This book is for many but especially for Kim, Stuart and Sally Mackinnon, Ken Livingstone, Victor Coleman and Barrie Nichol

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    Some sections of
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
have appeared in magazines so I would like to thank the magazines and their