Fiction or Prose Poem in CWBK; Does it matter?

It's Kate Litterer here. First, I have to mention that CWBK is one of the best works I've read in regards to developing a speaker in a group of poems. We learn all about Billy (BTK) through his personal accounts of his experiences, others' voices, and non-fictional accounts, such as interviews or photographs. Reading through the book with attention to the sequence of different types of writing (poems, prose poems/fiction, photos, etc.) really helped me to get a rounded view of BTK's experiences.

I definitely see a different style of writing between the poems and the works of fiction (or prose poems). The poems appear mostly through Billy's voice and I feel that they work almost like he's telling secrets through them. Interestingly, (perhaps this is a bias I hold against the rural badass character whom I'm assuming didn't study poetry) the poems are written very beautifully and provide me with insights into how Billy felt during his experiences. For example, on page 16, Billy's character says "[...] later my hands cracked in love juice / fingers paralysed by it arthritic / these beautiful fingers I couldn't move / faster than a crippled witch now" (lines 18-21). Realistically, this scene makes sense for a rough-and-tumble guy like Billy to have a sexual encounter and feel romantically toward a woman, but regarding the actual diction, descriptions like "arthritic" "beautiful fingers" that move as slow as a "crippled witch" really create a sensitive and vulnerable character. I think that Ondaatje uses the shorter poems to show the speaker a vulnerable, safer Billy, unlike the Billy we see in his prose or fiction; the conniving, story-telling Billy.

One of my favorite passages of prose in the collection starts on page 59. Billy is speaking and relays to us a story originally told by John Chisum: Livingstone, whom he had sung with, turned out to be a mad dog-breeder. This section of prose has a stronger narration than available through the small poems and brings life, death, and closure to Livingstone across the span of 4 pages. Lines like "When people asked him how the dogs were coming along, he said fine; it was all a secret system and he didn't want anyone looking in. He said he liked to get a piece of work finished before he showed it to people" help to progress John's story and to develop Livingstone's character (61). Although the prose works like a story, it broadcasts lines like "It was like breeding roses" in juxtaposition to the mad dog-breeding--this incorporates the poetic method of specifying Livingstone to the reader. For reasons such as that, I believe that the prose poems in CWBK don't necessarily work like pieces of fiction...they don't pick up where the last one left off and they link themselves to ideas that appear in the shorter poems. I had no difficulty reading them in succession to the shorter poems, but I do feel that they present Billy as a more guarded individual.

I viewed the pictures in the novel similarly to the way Virginia Woolf uses photos in Orlando (I'll bring a copy to class). Orlando is a biography of a fictional character and the transparent narrator is Orlando's biographer. Interspersed throughout the novel are photos of Orlando and his/her (he magically transforms into a woman halfway through the novel, making its biographical genre obviously fictional) friends. However, these photos are not really of the novel's characters, as made obvious through the appended notes. In CWBK, I could not help but to read the photos in the same manner...are these photos really of BTK and his friends? Why did Ondaatje pick those photos, real or not? This question riled me up to ask another question: IS THIS COLLECTION EVEN BIOGRAPHICAL IN NATURE AT ALL? I know that Ondaatje uses BTK's character to create a narrative sequence and shows us varied aspects of BTK, but does he fabricate occurences? He would have to. And I don't mind that at all--hearing BTK talk about sex in such a stereotypically/typically non-Western/rural/badass type of way is very gratifying.