A Multigenre Response to The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

Don't know why
but in my 10 years
of multigenring
I've never read
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
the book that sparked an idea
in Tom Romano

And the multigenre research paper was born.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJb6RM1dwOU

***

March 19, 2010

I just finished reading The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) by Michael Ondaatje. Although I really have no interest in Billy the Kid as a historical figure, and never would have read this book based on its title, Bill suggested I read it as a seminal work for my class project. I'm glad I did.

The book is a collection of poems, narratives, pictures, news reports, rememberings and an interview with Billy, who insists on being addressed as Mr. Bonney. By reading all of these genres together, one gets a multi-voiced perspective of the last two years of Billy's life. The book is raw and honest, the imagery striking.

Billy's accounts of murder, drunkness, and fornication are not appropriate for a K-12 audience, but a mature reader can appreciate the graphicness of this book. In one poem, Billy describes a chicken digging its beak in the throat of a dying man and pulling out a vein.

Meanwhile he [Gregory] fell
and the chicken walked away

still tugging at the vein
till is was 12 yards long
as if it held that body like a kite
Gregory's last words being

get away from me yer stupid chicken. (Ondaatje, 1970, p. 15)

This is what Tom Romano calls an "indelible moment."

***

T: So what did you think of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid?

K: I certainly can see how it sparked multigenre. The book is told from multiple genres from
the perspectives of Billy and those who knew him. I see a lot of similarities between this
book and the kind of multigenre papers I wrote in Romano's classes 9-10 years ago. I'm
surprised, though, that Romano didn't think of the Endnote concept until he'd been tinkering
with multigenre a few years. The Endnotes are very similar to what Ondaatje does at the
end of the book.

T: What do you mean?

K: Well, when I first learned multigenre, Romano required a Letter to the Reader as the first
genre in a long multigenre paper. Its purpose was to introduce the paper and tell the reader
any important information the reader may need to understand the paper. A few years later,
Romano started having his students provide Endnotes, or a few sentences of explantion for
each genre, at the end of the paper. The Endnotes are similar to the Acknowledgements and
Credits Ondaatje placed at the end of Billy the Kid. After the book, Ondaatje cited sources,
including books, photographs, written accounts, and comic books, that he used to characterize
Billy. "With these basic sources I have edited, rephrased, and slightly reworked the originals.
But the emotions belong to their authors" (Ondaatje, 1970).

T: Interesting. Did reading the book change the way you conceive of multigenre?

K: A little bit. I've always written multigenre papers where each piece of writing has been a
different kind of genre. I required my students to do the same, the only exception being the
repetend.

T: Repetend?

K: A repetend is a repeated genre, kind of like a chorus in a song. It acts as a transition between
major ideas in a multigenre paper.

T: OK.

K: So anyway, I only repeat a genre if it is part of the repetend. A multigenre paper may be
constructed like this:
Genre 1: Repetend 1--Word collage
Genre 2: poem
Genre 3: narrative
Genre 4: word collage
Genre 5: diary entry
Genre 6: Repetend 2--word collage
Genre 7: dream sequence
Genre 8: top ten list
Genre 9: letter


Ondaatjee's book begins as:
Genre 1: Note
Genre 2: Poem
Genre 3: Narrative
Genre 4: Poem
Genre 5: Narrative
Genre 6: Poem
Genre 7: Poem
Genre 8: Poem
Genre 9: Picture

For me, when I think of multigenre, I think of each piece as a different genre. I have never
written or assigned multigenre papers that only rely on a few genres repeated over and over
again.

T: Why is that?

K: I like forcing myself and my students to think of different ways of communicating the
same information. I love multigenre because it gets you away from the expected school
genres--narrative, essay, poem. I guess I shy away from Ondaatjean multigenre because it
seems too much like what we already do in school. Multigenre gives students a chance to
experiment with genres we don't always explicitly teach. It's more 'out of the box.'

T: Will you continue to write and and assign multigenre papers the way you always have, or are
you rethinking that structure based on your reading of Ondaatje?

K: I still want more variety of genres, but after reading Billy the Kid, I'm more open to the idea
of repeating more than the repetend genre or switching between a smaller number of
genres. Ondaatje does it well, but I'm afraid if I told most students they could do this, I'd
end of with multigenre papers that looked more like a book of poetry than multigenre as I
know it.

T: Is that wrong?

K: No, but like all new ideas, I'm going to have to take some time mulling it over. I'm not sold
on the idea of a multigenre paper using 2-3 genres back-and-forth, but I'm more open to
genre repetition than I was a day ago.

T: Fair enough.