A dagoba is a Sri Lankan term for a stupa. Well that's all very well, Michael, but not terribly helpful for those of us who then have to look up stupa. That's the thing about Ondaatje's poems - and his novels, come to think - they demand a kind of intelligent attention and a good dictionary. You can learn a lot reading him, and it's a sign of just how much I enjoyed his collection Handwriting that upon finishing it today I immediately located my battered Picador copy of his The Collected Works of Billy The Kid on the shelves and set about it with a will. (And with what astonishingly different worlds they deal! Lush, fecund Sri Lanka versus the astringent Wild West.)
The idea that you're supposed to set about looking things up and actually learn a bit about something is not a particularly common view of how to read poetry. I was quite startled when attending a seminar on the work of Pound at university - well more of an informal late night gathering in a lecturer's flat to listen to a guy who'd just edited an anthology of modern American verse with a whole lot of old Ezra featured in it - at which it was suggested that The Cantos were designed to make you go away and read the background stuff that would render them readable.
But, when you get down to it, it's difficult to imagine a poem of any depth that genuinely stands alone with no need of explanation. And I'm off to look up the Wikipedia pages on Billy the Kid, which didn't exist the first time I read the volume some time back in the 1980s. I've got a feeling I'm going to learn a lot and enjoy doing so, and thus enjoy Ondaatje's rendering of the tale in poetry, prose and the odd picture (and I mean odd) even more.
No comments:
Post a Comment