How is it that from the barest fragmentary materials from the life 21-year old likely psychopath there emerged 90 years later three transformative works: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid by Sam Peckinpah, and Knockin' on Heaven's Door by Bob Dylan? Perhaps this is how fact becomes myth becomes art. A dearth of materials is key. Less is likely more. How much do we really know about MacBeth? There will be no epics composed about Teddy Roosevelt because we have too many facts at hand. What’s there for the artist’s imagination to do? What’s needed is a single irritating grain of sand around which a pearl can be formed.

What Ondaatje’s imagination has created is a Life of Billy the Kid as series of frescoes, painted quickly on wet plaster on a hot day lying on splintery pine-scaffolding. These murals were then left to the elements and marauders and iconoclasts. Then we wander in centuries later and look up and marvel. We piece together the missing segments. We imagine for ourselves the fallen blank patches and people who’s eyes scratched out by brick-bats.

best thing ever!

Странна и психаделична колекция от парченца от живота и смъртта на Били Хлапето, известният стрелец от Дивия Запад. Не си падам много по поезия, особено модерна, но някак се отнесох в този хипнотичен калейдоскоп от психотични бележки, бели стихове, части от интервюта и снимки.

I read this book for an in-class discussion. I was amazed by number of things we talked about. Ondaatje was really of top of his craft when writing this book. My hat is off to him.

A multigenre and partly fictional biography of the not well known but much written about infamous young man who was part of the US Wild West period. As much romanticized as any outlaw in the history of the country. This one has photographs, poems presumed written by Billy (which could be a stretch in that he was unschooled), journal entries, letters, newspaper accounts. Very interesting short book that was also developed into a stage piece.

Liked it for the most part, but thought was really cool. Super interesting style and approach mixing poetry with unique prose. Not 5 star cause brain is too puny to process most poetry. However, I did like some included in this 1

It's been many, many years since I first read this little volume as a grad student, and maybe even taught it a time or two in courses as a GTA. I'd forgotten how much I loved it. This time I took my time, reading and re-reading selections so that my brain could sink as much as possible into the dusty, sun-baked landscapes that Ondaatje evokes, Old West streets littered with scraps of newspaper, pages ripped from dime-novels, some old photographs, wanted posters. I probably have a better vocabulary now to understand this as a kind of remix project. What I'd forgotten was how utterly weird and hallucinatory this book gets -- one of my favorite most disturbing sequences is Billy's heat delirium while on horseback, when he has his body turned inside out. Scenes like that and the eroticism and the juxtaposition of calm, quiet, stillness with the explosive violence simply mesmerize, and would turn this into a cinematic myth if it weren't so much about the language and the textuality of it all. The book makes me recall how much I used to enjoy looking and reading through my grandparents' copies of some Old West Frontier magazines or seeing commercials for the old leather-bound Time/Life Old West series, especially "The Gunfighters" -- "John Wesley Harding, who once shot a man just for snoring" -- when I was a kid. Of course, those magazines and volumes didn't have Billy declaring he'd been peeled inside out from the tip of his cock and then got "good and fucked by Christ," or would feature a line as beautiful and haunting as "Poor young William's dead / with a fish stare, with a giggle / with blood planets in his head."

I'd say this book is like a Terence Malick movie transformed into poetry/prose/a few pictures. It's fragmentary, nebulous, disintegrating, nonsensical, beautiful, weird, scary, quiet, even silent. It's got lots and lots of white space. For a reason. I think it's wonderful and I want to spend even more time with it, let it soak in a bit more before further reports. One thing to say: it's very much an Ezra Pound poetry as history sort of thing, but clearer (but only because we know the myth immediately since it's still prevalent, as opposed to, say, the history of the Malatesta family in 16th century Italy). Enjoy it.

What I think Ondaatje does well in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is that he doesn’t tell this Western tale in the form of a traditional Western narrative. And in this case, I think it makes the collected narratives (we get perspectives from Sallie and Paulita too) more interesting. And I think this formatting says something about the way we tell and have told stories. As the reader, we hardly get a linearly structured story. I found myself reaching back to previous pages often. For example, “Up with the curtain” ended up being a direct correlation to the way Ondaatje (as Billy) describes Sallie’s skirt four pages later: “the long skirt falling like a curtain off her legs and touching the floor” (63, 67). And in retrospect, it becomes evident that William Bonney is doing the “down with your pants” dance with Sallie (63). I don’t mean to make it seem like I was only preoccupied with the cowboy smut, but it was kind of fun that the reader gets to play the literary Wild West version of Clue through events and people’s profiles, right? But more importantly, in the way that Ondaatje writes about Billy, I think he emulates a resounding truth about legend and about oral history: we must always reach back into the past in order to find out anything, to make sense of anything presently.

It would be remiss to talk about form without talking about the photographs as well. Isn’t it interesting that we’re never given a real-life photo of Billy? Only him on the cover of a children’s book near the end. And what is that first page supposed to mean? It says we, the reader, have been sent “a picture of Billy made with the Perry shutter as quick as it can be worked” (5). But we’re obviously given only an empty border of a box where a photo should be. I think Ondaatje’s purpose for this was to intentionally leave the reader’s idea of Billy up to the imagination. For us to decide who he was along the way. And I’d argue that because we’re never offered a “real” picture of any cowboy—there are none showing a man donned with the hat and pistols or rifles anywhere, after all—I think this collection is meant to get the reader to empathize with the Kid. Ondaatje finally gives us our cowboy photo at the very end. Only it’s a child who looks like he’s simply dressed as the part. A child who arguably looks like he has bucked teeth. And if this is the photo that’s meant to fill the empty border we got at the beginning, I see it as a page in a scrapbook with only one photo in a whole book. I see a kid who died a kid. And in that light, this story/these stories become an incredibly heartbreaking journey.

couldn't help but think of the sisters brothers while reading it, this book comes off worse for the comparison. contrived & pretentious. built for lit classes, not for readers.

Fanfiction, expertly.

No idea how to rate this book. It was mesmerizing. It took forever to read. It had some spectacular bits of writing. It wasn’t a story. It was a story. It was poetry. It was prose. At a minimum, the author really knows what he’s doing with a pen.