SOURCE: “Moving to the Clear: Michael Ondaatje,” in Twelve Voices: Interviews with Canadian Poets, Borealis Press, 1980, pp. 129-44.

[In the following interview, which was conducted in 1978, Ondaatje discusses his poetry, particularly the creative process.]

[Jon Pearce]: When did you start to write? Did you write at all in England when you lived there as a teen-ager?

[Michael Ondaatje]: No. I think I did write one short story, but I didn't have much interest in writing at the time. I had read a lot, but had actually no interest in writing. I started to write in 1963 and The Dainty Monsters came out in 1967.

How do you account for such a mature, sophisticated, and well-crafted book as The Dainty Monsters? Most writers go through a period of apprenticeship, which seems to be necessary in order to get rid of their bad poems. But you don't seem to have had to do that.

I don't know how to answer that question. I had no interest in poetry. I don't think, until I came to Canada and went to university here. I started writing a lot then and some of the stuff wasn't much good at first. Most of the poems in The Dainty Monsters came about from 1964 to 1967. The first couple of years they weren't there.

Who helped you? Who influenced you?

You met poets in Canada. If I'd continued to live in England, I would never have met any poets—or at least it would have been very unlikely. I met poets here like D.G. Jones and Raymond Souster. Poets in Kingston, where I was going to university, like Tom Marshall and Tom Eadie. And I think what happened was at that time there was a lot of conversation about writing among us, and I tended to ask for comments when I sent manuscripts off to magazines, and I was very lucky; I got lots of reactions to the poems. One of the persons I recall was Milton Wilson of the Canadian Forum, who took great trouble with the poems. Not only did he take some poems for the Forum, but he wrote back and made comments about them. Once he gave me good advice which I didn't take. In “Pigeons, Sussex Avenue”, he thought there were a couple of lines that were unnecessary; but I was convinced they were crucial and the poem was published in the magazine as it was. Later, when I was editing The Dainty Monsters, I realized he was quite right and I dropped the two lines—about three years too late.

Can I interrupt for a minute? I've compared some of your poems as they have appeared in anthologies with the poem as it appears in book form. And it seems to me that there hasn't been much editing done. Is that true?

Essentially, a lot of the editing has been done before the poem goes out. I tend to keep a poem around for a long time—at least six months or a year—before I send it out. Before The Dainty Monsters came out, for example, two people helped me a great deal with the editing. Wayne Clifford criticized the individual poems, and George Whalley helped me with the structure of the book as a whole. I learned a great deal from both of them.

Do you find that you revise poems extensively in the six months that you keep them around?

Yes, very much so. They usually get shorter and they usually get a bit more subtle than they were in the first place. But there's a lot of editing going on.

How long does it take you to write a poem?

A poem like “A House Divided” took me about twenty seconds and I never changed that one. I was stunned: some poems get written like that but they only get written like that because you work on other poems and learn something subconsciously. I think editing comes not just in changing the words but in working with the form of the whole poem.

The matter of editing interests me a great deal—it's different for every poem. But usually the poem gets tightened in some way or gets loosened in some way. Sometimes the poem is too tight to begin with and it needs to breathe a bit more, and you go back to the poem after a couple of months and you see that it's too introverted and too tight and one has to blow some air into it somehow and start again. So, with a book, what happens usually is that there is a process of editing within the actual individual poem, and also there is a process of structuring the book which is also part of the editing.

In one of your published statements, you say, “I usually take my own aesthetics very lightly. Laws and rules and aesthetic principles I think are dangerous if you carry them over into your next poem.” But then you go on to say that “there is usually a set of rules in each poem but it's organic.” Do you attempt to implement the principles of organic form both within a particular poem in the book, as well as in the book as a whole? You were talking a moment ago about the structure of a book.

Well, I definitely think there has to be an organic structure in a book, and I think that's what really interests me in books like Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter It's a case of finding that structure after you've written the book. It's a case of the poem or the book getting written as a whole and then trying to find the sharpest way of presenting that organic form—if that makes any sense.

This would involve editing, of course.

It would definitely involve editing, not just within each poem but the way in which each poem would be placed in relation to every other poem in the book. So that there would be a rhythm in the book.

Some poets don't seem to bother with the notion of a structure or a rhythm in a book; they just lump the poems together willy-nilly, with no apparent thought for the interrelationships.

That's fine for them, but it would upset me greatly.

Can I go back to The Dainty Monsters for a moment? What does the epigraph from W.H. Auden refer to: “We've been watching you over the garden wall / for hours…”? Who are the “we?”

I don't know.

There's a garden here with a wall that apparently divides the animal world from the human world. I'm wondering about the connection between the two worlds. Who are the “we”? The humans or the animals? And what kind of garden is this? Does it have anything to do with the Garden of Eden?

I think both things come up, but I don't know for sure who the “we” is.

What we're talking about is the poetic process. If I may, I'd like to continue along these lines and ask you a couple more questions

Sure, but you probably won't get any straight answers.

When talking about the poem “Peter”, you've said, “My only emotion about my own work is curiosity.” This statement implies that—somehow—after the writing of the poem you've become detached from it, that you look upon it in a curious, disinterested way. As if it wasn't yours. Can you explain that: how you can dissociate yourself from something you once must have been so close to?

I think if you still like the poem after two years or after ten years, you get a certain pleasure out of it. But it is, I think, essentially curiosity, trying to remember how you were at the time when you wrote that poem. Your state of mind, your trying to remember the sources of that poem—curiosity is what I think I'm talking about. No, once you've written the poem, the poem doesn't belong to you; once you've written the poem, it's out there—not part of you any longer. For instance, a character like Billy or Buddy Bolden: it's like having known someone very well—intensely for a certain amount of time while you were writing the book. Then there's a fantastic separation that comes when you finish the book and leave the characters or the poem behind.

In a sense, I lived with Billy when I wrote the book for three or four years and with Bolden for about six years. You know, living with those characters for all that time so intensely means they are always in the back of your mind. Your thinking will be thought by you and is thought by the character simultaneously. But when the book is finished, or when you finish the actual writing of the book, then you get the fun of shaping that person from the outside—in terms of giving the manuscript to friends and saying, “What do you think is missing here?” or “Should this be clearer there or is this too vague?”. Questions like that. Then it's like a piece of sculpture more than personal expression.

I have no desire, for instance, to go back and re-write Billy or re-investigate Bolden. Just recently there's another book on Bolden that's come out in the States. I have absolutely no desire to read the thing. Even if it gives me all kinds of new material about Bolden, I'm not at all interested in it. For me, Bolden is a character who is important to me only as I knew him. He's there now and I still like him, and now and then I'll see something in the street that I will see the way he saw it.

Let me quote you again. You say that “at universities and schools teachers are preoccupied with certain aspects of content, with themes, with messages.” Then you go on to say “that's only about half of poetry”. If so, what's the other half?

You sound like a lawyer, a criminal lawyer.

Well, I'm not. I'm a school-teacher. But I do happen to have some notes in front of me. I've prepared a bit of a brief so I can try to get you to say what you mean.

Okay. The other half… style, technique, the method and movement of the poem. I think William Carlos Williams or someone said he could summarize all the main things about poetry on the back of a postage stamp… that's a minor part of the poem. If you read a love poem, well obviously there will be nothing new in a love poem—it's just the way it's said and it's the way it's said that makes it suddenly hit you.

So the question shouldn't be “What does the poem mean”, but “How does a poem mean”?

Yes, the way the poem means.

Let me ask you something else about technique. I find the incidence of your use of figurative language more frequent than in many poets. More important, though—since figurative language is an essential element of the language of poetry—I find your use of it… bizarre, disturbing, arresting, sometimes shocking. It makes the reader sit up and take notice.

What do you mean by figurative language?

Figurative language is language used with a twist, as in a drink of Scotch. It's not straight Scotch; it's boosted. The girl's hair isn't honey hair, literally; it's probably browny-blonde… And by figurative language, I suppose I mean, most simply and conventionally, simile, metaphor, and the like.

Now, when I read that someone “drowned / in the beautiful dark orgasm of his mouth” or a young girl “burns the lake / by reflecting her red shoes in it” or a pregnant woman has inside her “another, / thrashing like a fish”, I find myself getting anxious about these jagged, almost violent images. Am I getting to something that's characteristic of your poetry and that you deliberately and consciously use?

This is very difficult. Two things are very difficult for me to answer: one is, you know, why I write in a certain way, which I think is what you're asking; and the other is what I think of someone's interpretation of a poem. But, trying to answer the first question, why I use these images, I don't think I'm conscious of it when I'm writing; I'm not conscious of trying to shock someone when I'm writing with a specific image. That just happens in the process of writing, but I'm not conscious of it while I'm writing it. I don't know what more I can say about that. It's there, and it's obviously part of my style. But I don't think I'm a particularly violent poet, which some people feel I am, and I don't think I'm a grotesque poet, as some people think. You know, I think I have a vision of reality that is totally normal to me.

But a lot of the imagery tends toward the violent—

Yes, that's true—

And it's not just the material—the subject matter—that determines the nature of the imagery. In Billy the Kid, for example, the image when he's riding chained to his horse and the sun reaches down through Billy's head and pulls him inside out, that—at least to my tender mind—is certainly bizarre.

Yes, but you know, the poor guy is having some form of sunstroke. For me in Billy I can see just as much gentleness as violence; for me there's a balance. And I really tried to keep the number of deaths in Coming Through Slaughter to a minimum.

Maybe the elements of violence in Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter are unavoidable. But what I was interested in asking about were some of the same things in the earlier poems—in The Dainty Monsters and in Rat Jelly

Well, maybe something got clarified in Billy that didn't get clarified in the earlier poems, although I think I could go back and see preparations for Billy in The Dainty Monsters… The thing is it's a very real world to me and if people don't want to see that as part of the real world, then they're ignoring it. It's been said that violence is normal in our lifetime just as good manners were normal to the world that Jane Austen created. You know, it's a reality. It's getting a balance between the two worlds—the violent and the gentle—but both exist.

I know that you're not going to like this, but I'd like to talk about poetics once more. Poets frequently comment on poetry in the poems that they write, and the one in which you do most obviously is “‘The gate in his head’”. Let me quote some of it:

Victor, the shy mind
revealing the faint scars
coloured strata of the brain,
not clarity but the sense of shift
a few lines, the tracks of thought
.....My mind is pouring chaos
in nets onto the page.
A blind lover, dont know
what I love till I write it out.
And then from Gibson's your letter
with a blurred photograph of a gull.
Caught vision. The stunning white bird
an unclear stir.
And that is all this writing should be then.
The beautiful formed things caught at the wrong moment
so they are shapeless, awkward
moving to the clear.

Now I have three questions to ask you. What do you mean by “My mind is pouring chaos / in nets onto the page”? Is that somehow a description of the poetic process for you?

Sometimes.

What does it mean?

I find it difficult answering questions that ask me specifically to interpret some lines in a poem. I'm not being evasive, but I just find it very difficult. You want me to write the poem and then to interpret the poem. But I'm not being evasive.

Let me try the second question. The poet—or let's say the speaker—is “A blind lover”; he's attached to something, but can't see or understand properly. Then: “dont know / what I love till I write it out.” When I read that, I thought of that old chestnut “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Have you ever heard that?

No, but it sounds good to me.

The “blind lover” is “pouring chaos”, which is caught “in nets” on the page; but he really doesn't know what he loves—what he's attached to, what his subject matter is—until he sees it on paper. The writing of a poem seems to be a process of discovery, knowing, seeing.

The third question is this: why are “The beautiful formed things caught at the wrong moment”? I don't understand that.

I really don't like interpreting my own poetry. I hope you can understand that.

Well, since you're reluctant to answer questions about particular lines, what is the poet's responsibility to his poetry or to his poems?

I think he has to remain silent after he's written the poem. I think it only damages a poem to have the poet try to explain it. I can't understand writers who do this. The statement that a poet makes in a poem is just as much the way he says it as what he says. To ask someone who's said something in a poem to paraphrase it or to expand that statement can only destroy a poem, for me. It's the case of a poem being looked on as a crossword puzzle; the reader wants to know exactly what is meant. But I don't think the reader should ask the poet exactly what he is saying.

What he wants to say he has said, and a poem is important in what it doesn't say as well as what it says. You want to reach just the right tone or mood, the point where you don't say certain things, you say certain things, you say certain things in a certain way. You have enough faith in the audience for the reader to be able to interpret what was said by just the amount you've said. I'm often horrified when I hear a poet talking on about a poem he's written. Often this happens at readings; people over-expand before they've read or over-expand after they've read or in a question period go on about the poem or what they wanted to do. For them to have to do this, the poem has failed in some way. I would rather try it over again when it's failed, but I think it's the duty of the poet to remain silent. I think he can talk about various things, but to say more about the poem he damages the poem in some way.

I'm not sure that I agree with you.

Maybe not; but I think it's a point of view.

I think that what a poet has to say about his own poetry or about a particular poem that he's written has a peculiar interest, and that's why I asked you those questions. I don't think that what he has to say about that poem has a peculiar authority, though. My reading of those lines might be fully as legitimate as yours.

Exactly! That's exactly the point I'm trying to make: your point of view has exactly the same validity as my point of view.

Yes, but yours might be a little more interesting…

But you say “peculiar” in terms of a peculiar interest—

A different interest. If a friend of mine were listening to this conversation, he might not be so interested in what I had to say about those lines as he would be in what you had to say about those lines. You'd have a peculiar interest for him because you put the lines on the page. But, nevertheless, my remarks might be just as valid as yours. Of course, if we go to the other extreme and if we say that my remarks are equally as good as yours—and so and so's are equally as good as yours and mine—don't we get into a completely relativistic view of poetry? This would allow the freshman horticulture student to read Blake's “Sick Rose” as an allegory of a certain kind of plant disease. (This is a true story, by the way.)

That's lovely.

But the reading isn't sound; it doesn't work.

I'd still be more interested in what the horticulturist had to say.

Okay, can I at this point go back to “‘The gate in his head’” for the last time? I still think it constitutes an important statement of Michael Ondaatje's poetics.

First, there seems to be a catch-22 involved: though the last four lines obviously state a view of what your poetry ought to do, by their own terms they can't clearly be interpreted to state anything. “All this writing” should be, if you succeed, “beautiful formed things caught at the wrong moment / so they are shapeless, awkward”—or, as you say in the first stanza, “not clarity but the sense of shift”. Therefore, even these lines that I've quoted, if they are successful, must necessarily be “blurred” themselves—“an unclear stir”—and not susceptible to a clear interpretation.

It seems to me that you're putting a radical twist on the reluctance of poets to provide questioners with the “meanings” of their poems. And this is not a bad thing; I don't disagree with you. After all, you've struggled long and hard to say with precision what you've wanted to say in the poem. So if you drop statements about the poem's meaning, you run the risk of having your poem damaged by school-teachers or critics who plaster these statements of meaning over the poetic structure you worked so hard on. I know all this—or at least you've told me all this—and I sympathize with your position.

However, it seems that your reluctance to commit yourself is extreme because of your radical view of the nature and function of poetry. You seem to be trying to write a poetry which is necessarily uninterpretable, without meaning. Yet I don't believe this is simply art for art's sake: there seems to be a fundamental seriousness of purpose here in which poetry is conceived as a necessary extension of your mind—and the world. You use the poem to create—create and discover at the same time—a freshness and vitality which can be found only midway between chaos and form: “My mind is pouring chaos / in nets onto the page.” “In nets”, because without form nothing is apprehensible; yet sufficiently “chaos” to be alive, not yet killed by the dead weight of absolute form—the canned, the tired, the repeatable. Thus, if you are successful, your poems must not be clear, but “moving to the clear”. I don't know what you would want to call such poetic events—Truth or Reality—but I think the important point is that it is what the speaker in the poem loves.

Now, I don't know whether you want to respond to that or not. It isn't really a question, anyway.

Yes, I think that's a pretty good interpretation of it. The thing here is to remember constantly that the poem is not real life; the poem is a poem, the poem is a work of art. It's an artifice, it's a chair, it was made by somebody, and what is involved is what happens when you put the chair into a room. What is involved also is how the person made the chair, and what is important is the other chairs the person has made. I think one can look at a poem by itself and appreciate the poem as an object of pleasure or pain or whatever, but for the writer himself what is important is something else; it's not just the poem because the poem represents a certain phase he has been through or something like that which appears in the poem later on. There is some kind of continuity in a writer's work and that is what is important for the writer. A poem is a passageway, in that sense, from what he felt before to what he feels at the end of the poem. He can't go back and write poem G after having written poem H—I mean, you can't go back to the state of mind or what you believed before you wrote the poem. Basically, that's it, I think.

A poem is a process of clarifying something? A process of discovery?

Both those things. But that's not all; there is something else there, too. I'd hate to think that a poem completed was a total canning of an incident or an event. It's something more; there has to be some kind of air in the poem that comes from… there's got to be an open door or something at the end of the poem, so that you can step out or the writer can step out and admit that this isn't everything.

Do you ever write a poem about something you already know?

No, I don't think so. I can't think of anything I've known before I wrote the poem.

So you would never sit down and write a poem about a certain deeply-felt belief or conviction or attitude?

Well, I think all those convictions and beliefs probably come out in the poem somewhere, but I didn't necessarily have those beliefs and convictions before I sat down and wrote the poem. If I have a very definite attitude about something, I'm not going to write a poem about it—because I already know what the attitude is. The poem is the way you learn something essential about yourself or about people—or about language—all those things. What I may appreciate about a poem could be simply the way the poem moves on the page, the way the poem looks on the page, the way the language is used on the page—it could have nothing to do with these other issues.

Does what we're been talking about have anything to do with the notion of a descent into the depths of one's self, a discovery of one's self, and a final “surfacing”? Several recent essays have suggested this as an important aspect of Canadian literature. Do you think this is the case in both Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter?

Yes, I think so, but I think that is true of all poems in a way. I think any poem has got a sense of that process of investigating something—an emotion, a problem, a feeling, a celebration.

In Billy and in Slaughter I think it's the same thing but on a larger scale—it's a discovery of someone… I could never write a formal detective novel. As much as I love Agatha Christie, I could not plot ahead and know who the murderer was until I got to ten pages before the end. The state that I ought to be in as a writer is the state of the reader in reading an Agatha Christie novel—going into a room blind. It's that sense of finding something out in the process of the poem or a novel. When I was writing these two books, I was in the state of trying to find out something about somebody else.

It's a process of unfolding?

It's a process of unfolding. If you already know the last line of the poem, how can you write the poem? You can't. But you can take the last line and make it the first line and go on from there. Anything else is boring, you know, if you know where it is going to end.

In both books, Billyand Slaughter, this technique of discovery leads to a pessimistic conclusion…

No, I don't think so.

But Billy is dead and Buddy Bolden lives the last twenty-four years of his life in a mental asylum.

I don't think that's pessimistic.

Why not?

Because other people in the book end up in a state that's worse. I think if Billy ends up as a convict figure—this is more obnoxious to me than ending up dead. Or if Bolden ends up as a rank amateur worrying whether Perry Como is going to record his other songs—this is worse to me. I don't find Slaughter depressing. There's a calm in Bolden that is justified for him. If it's justified for him, then that's all right. Obviously the book is not joyous, but I don't find it depressing at all. On the physical level, it is, and in a way he's somewhat limited in vision by the end, but I don't find it a depressing book… The whole process of writing books like that also is not a personal one and that interests me. I know when I was writing both Billy and Slaughter, I had a sense that it wasn't just my point of view that was writing the book; it was people around me that I knew, the interests of people around me, being aware of certain things—certain questions—from the point of view of people around me as much as myself. It doesn't matter who writes the book; the book is for me a kind of funneling of various people's ideas and emotions, between the years 1968 and 1973 or 1973 to 1976, who represent your age and your group and the book comes out that way. If I'd started to write a book about Buddy Bolden in the year 1984, it would be a totally different book, obviously, because the concerns of people around me would be different and my concerns would be different. It's just as important to consider the people around you as to have your own vision, even though they don't know you're writing a book about Buddy Bolden. And I tend not to tell anyone what I'm writing about until I've finished a couple of versions of the book. So I think in that sense that the book was almost written by a community, and this is very important to me. A friend tells a joke in 1969 and I remember that, and that will somehow become part of the organic movement of the book; to me that's important. Just as in a poem, the nicest poems are the poems that kind of take in everything around you—the time, the smell of the kitchen, the taste of the wine.. Once that process is finished—the actually writing of the book into a first official draft—I give it to my wife and three or four friends who look at it and I listen to them and get their reactions to the thing, and there the conversation is on the level of “What happened to Webb?” and “Don't you think Webb should come back in a bit more?” or “What exactly is Angela's relationship?” And that I love—I love that moment. Several people are important to me when a book is finished. Dennis Lee and B.P. Nichol have been very important to me both in Billy the Kid and Slaughter, and friends like Ken Livingstone and my wife and Stan Dragland—these people can read something cold and can say, “This character isn't really formed here”. Then you do a different kind of writing to make it clearer, which is separate from the process of investigating.

Are both Billy and Buddy artists, in a sense?

Some people have interpreted Billy as an artist, and on some level—on an instinctual level—he is an artist. But he isn't a portrait of the artist for me; I didn't intend to make a statement about the artist in Billy. In Slaughter I probably was—so I guess that's the only reason why I hesitate to answer questions about the role of the artist in society, because in a way I spent four years writing a book about the artist. But I can't make a general statement about the artist in society, because you can't make a statement like that through an individual and obviously the statement about Bolden is not a statement about you or me or about John Newlove. Every artist is different, every artist begins with a different smell from the fridge. You can't generalize from one person. Obviously, Bolden is a certain individual and I wanted to keep that.

How do you yourself feel about the role of the artist? You, as an artist? You, as an artist in our society?

First of all, I try not to think of myself as an “artist”. If I did, I simply wouldn't be able to continue to write. I think if people are conscious of themselves as artists continually, it would be a deadly situation to be in. One wants to be a real person and live in a real world, as opposed to being an artist. I certainly don't feel any kind of duty to society as an “artist” at all. God knows what the role of the poet is.

Let me ask you a further question. You've talked about some Canadian novelists and used the term “moral intent”. Are your intentions “moral” in your art? Do you write poems and novels that are intended to have some “moral” effect upon the reader? Do you have some kind of “moral” view?

First of all, it's very difficult to say what is “moral” and what is not “moral”—we've got a whole half-hour conversation there. “Moral” unfortunately has the suggestion of being either religious or political, but for me moral is much wider; moral is everything. The word “human” is better. Morality is just one per cent of a human to me. I certainly don't intend, when I write a poem, to be moral, or to say what is the right thing one should do in a certain situation. I'm more interested in what a human being will do in a certain situation. This involves good people and bad people. I'm not too interested in bad people; I don't seem to meet characters I dislike in my writing. Take a fictional work like the Bolden book: there are very few characters I think I can say are bad people, even if somebody else makes this character out to be a bad person. Human beings are sometimes screwed up, sometimes not screwed up, sometimes going in the wrong direction, but I don't find any of them evil or bad. I wouldn't go out of my way to talk about a person who is bad just so I can set him up as a symbol of badness. That kind of puppetry doesn't interest me very much.

You seem to be less interested in artistic and moral beings than you are in human beings. Is that fair to say?

I suppose so. In Slaughter, Buddy Bolden is an artist, but he's also a barber. Obviously, the book is about art, but the artistic element is just one aspect of Bolden's being human… I hate the term “artist”, I hate the term “poet”, it has so many connotations of someone who is separate from the real world, someone who supposedly “deserves” more, “knows” more, than the man on the street. It suggests someone who is superior to any other craftsman that exists around us today, and I think this is a real problem of artists. It's been created by artists who go around saying they are visionaries or they're prophets or they're noble figures. To me that's a corruption. I like the term “writer” simply because it's someone who does something, who is using words.

Like an artisan.

Yes, like an artisan. I think one can be professional in the way one writes, but to put one's self forward as a “poet” is so limiting—it cuts you off essentially from the real world.

Some people look at that whole matter from the opposite end. For instance, P.K. Page would say that it's not possible for one's ego to be enhanced by writing, because writing isn't done by P.K. Page; it's done only through her, it comes from somewhere else. But let me ask you one final question: why do you write?

I'm still not sure. I enjoy it, I think.

Isn't it hard?

Oh yes, but I think there can be pleasure in certain kinds of hardness or difficulty.

Yes, but is it not difficult to do it day after day, month after month, year after year?

Well, it keeps me busy; otherwise, I might be out robbing a Mac's Milk Store.