ONDAATJE, (Philip) Michael

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Nationality: Canadian. Born: Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), 12 September 1943. Education: St. Thomas' College, Colombo; Dulwich College, London; Bishop's University, Lennoxville, Quebec, 1962–64; University of Toronto, B.A. 1965; Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, M.A. 1967. Family: Married 1) Betty Kimbark in 1963, one daughter and one son; 2) Kim Jones (separated). Career: Taught at the University of Western Ontario, London, 1967–71. Since 1971 member of the Department of English, currently professor, Glendon College, York University, Toronto. Visiting professor, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, summer 1979, Brown University, 1990; editor, Mongrel Broadsides. Awards: Ralph Gustafson award, 1965; Epstein award, 1966; E.J. Pratt Medal, 1966; President's Medal, University of Western Ontario, 1967; Canada Council grant, 1968, 1977; Governor-General's award, 1971, 1980; Canada-Australia prize, 1980; Booker McConnell prize, British Book Trust, and Governor General's award, 1992, for The English Patient.Address: Department of English, Glendon College, York University, 2275 Bayview Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4N 3M6, Canada.

Publications

Poetry

The Dainty Monsters. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1967.

The Man with Seven Toes. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1969.

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems. Toronto, Anansi, 1970; New York, Norton, 1974; London, Boyars, 1981.

Rat Jelly. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1973.

Elimination Dance. Ilderton, Ontario, Naim Coldstream, 1978; revised edition, Ilderton, Brick, 1980.

There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do: Poems 1963–1978. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, and New York, Norton, 1979; as Rat Jelly and Other Poems 1963–1978, London, Boyars, 1980.

Secular Love. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1984; New York, Norton, 1985.

Two Poems. Milwaukee, Woodland Pattern, 1986.

The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems. London, Pan, 1989; New York, Knopf, 1992.

Handwriting. London, Bloomsbury, 1998; New York, Vintage, 2000.

Plays

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (produced Stratford, Ontario, 1973; New York, 1974; London, 1984).

Coming through Slaughter, adaptation of his own novel (produced Toronto, 1980).

Novels

Coming through Slaughter. Toronto, Anansi, 1976; New York, Norton, 1977; London, Boyars, 1979.

In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, New York, Knopf, and London, Secker and Warburg, 1987.

The English Patient. London, Picador, 1992.

Anil's Ghost. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, New York, Knopf, and London, Bloomsbury, 2000.

Other

Leonard Cohen. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1970.

Claude Glass. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1979.

Tin Roof. Lantzville, British Columbia, Island, 1982.

Running in the Family. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, and New York, Norton, 1982; London, Gollancz, 1983.

Editor, The Broken Ark (animal verse). Toronto, Oberon Press, 1971; revised edition, as A Book of Beasts, 1979.

Editor, Personal Fictions: Stories by Munro, Wiebe, Thomas, and Blaise. Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1977.

Editor, The Long Poem Anthology. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1979.

Editor, with Russell Banks and David Young, Brushes with Greatness: An Anthology of Chance Encounters with Greatness. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1989.

Editor, with Linda Spalding, The Brick Anthology. Toronto, Coach House Press. 1989.

Editor, The Faber Book of Contemporary Canadian Short Stories. London, Faber, 1990.

Editor, From Ink Lake: An Anthology of Canadian Short Stories. New York, Viking, 1990.

Editor, with B.P. Nichol and George Bowering, An H in the Heart: A Reader. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1994.

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Manuscript Collection: National Archives, Ottawa; Metropolitan Toronto Library.

Critical Studies: Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje edited by Sam Solecki, Montreal, Véhicule Press, 1985; The Other Side of Dailiness: Photography in the Works of Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje, and Margaret Laurence by Lorraine M. York, Toronto, ECW Press, 1988; "Outlaw and Explorer: Recent Adventurers in the English-Canadian Long Poem" by Robert A. Kelly, in Antigonish Review (Antigonish, Nova Scotia), 79, autumn 1989; "Michael Ondaatje and the Problem of History" in CLIO (Fort Wayne, Indiana), 19(2), winter 1990; "Michael Ondaatje and the Production of Myth" by George Elliott Clarke, in Studies in Canadian Literature (Fredericton, New Brunswick), 16(1), 1991; "'The Widening Rise of Surprise': Containment and Transgression in the Poetry of Michael Ondaatje" by Ajay Heble, in Wascana Review of Contemporary Poetry and Short Fiction (Regina, Saskatchewan), 26(1–2), spring-fall 1991; "Coming through the Spider's Web: Ondaatje's Murderous Metaphors" by Edward Parkinson, in Signature, 5, summer 1991; "'Sri Lankan' Canadian Poets: The Bourgeoisie That Fled the Revolution" by Suwanda H.J. Sugunasiri, in Canadian Literature (Vancouver, British Columbia), 132, spring 1992; Michael Ondaatje by Douglas Barbour, New York, Twayne, 1993; Discoveries of the Other: Alterity in the Work of Leonard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, Michael Ondaatje, and Nicole Brossard by Winfried Siemerling, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1994; "Postmodern Canadian Autobiography: Daphne Marlatt's 'How Hug a Stone' and Michael Ondaatje's 'Running in the Family'" by Annette Lonnecke, in The Guises of Canadian Diversity: New European Perspectives, edited by Serge Jaumain and Marc Maufort, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1995; "'Fears of Primitive Otherness': 'Race' in Michael Ondaatje's 'The Man with Seven Toes'" by Gerry Turcotte, in Constructions of Colonialism: Perspectives on Eliza Fraser's Shipwreck, edited by Ian J. McNiven and others, London, Leicester University Press, 1998.

Theatrical Activities: Director: Films —Sons of Captain Poetry, 1971; Carry on Crime and Punishment, 1972; Royal Canadian Hounds, 1973; The Clinton Special, 1974.

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It is ironic that Michael Ondaatje is a writer who exemplifies every aspect of the Whitman tradition in American poetry, for he is a Canadian writer, though once removed, since he was born and spent his boyhood in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). His exotic story is told in a work of prose, Running in the Family, which most people read as if it were poetry. Indeed, Ondaatje is a melting pot of techniques, and his work, as Whitman said of his own, "contains multitudes."

Ondaatje's writing can take the form of intense lyric poems, as in "Kim at Half an Inch":

Brain is numbed
is body touch
and smell, warped light
 
hooked so close
her left eye
is only a golden blur
her ear a vast
musical instrument of flesh
 
The moon spills off my shoulder
slides into her face

It also can look like prose but work as poetic language and the retelling or making of myth, as does what is perhaps his best-known book, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, which won the Governor-General's award in 1971. Moving in and out of imagined landscape, portrait and documentary, and anecdote and legend, Ondaatje writes for the eye and the ear simultaneously. A critic reviewing his work for Books in Canada in 1982 said that "each new book of Michael Ondaatje's seems wholly different from those that preceded it, and wholly the same … the characters keep outgrowing the confines of fact."

Like Whitman, Ondaatje is a writer of democratic vistas. He is fascinated by the lives of common people who do uncommon things, such as Billy the Kid, or figures from the world of jazz like Buddy Bolden, the subject of Coming through Slaughter. His own family seems impersonally related to him, as with Whitman's eye he sees equally both the large and the small, the close and the distant. Also like Whitman, he is fascinated by the taboos and peculiarities that combine to give him a voice that is unique but also universal.

Unlike Whitman, however, Ondaatje has a dark, witty side that makes his poetic voice irreverent, though rarely abrasive. His language alternates between the short lines of lyric verse and the long lines that actually become prose or prose poetry. His work lends itself to theater, and he has made several films as well. Yet his identity is as a poet, for it is the voice that is central in Ondaatje's work, a voice giving him control over both interiors and exteriors, as in these lines from The Collected Works of Billy the Kid :

I am here with the range for everything
corpuscle muscle hair
hands that need the rub of metal
those senses that
that want to crash things with an axe
that listen to deep buried veins in our palms
those who move in dreams over your women night
near you, every paw, the invisible hooves
the mind's invisible blackout the intricate never
the body's waiting rut.

What Ondaatje also possesses is a gift to draw on the myths of American culture in such a way that the reader can understand the depth of common experience. From a young outlaw of the American West to a strange, neurasthenic New Orleans jazz trumpet player to his eccentric relatives with their pet cobra warming itself on the radio in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje writes with lyric intensity about the differences we all share.

—Diane Wakoski