Manifesto?

Michael Ondaatje has been a favourite of mine the last few months. His treatment of language and identity is abundantly complex and interesting, but what has most influenced me is his style of writing. It is very difficult to sustain a poetic register through three hundred pages of narrative story-telling. I think the reason Ondaatje is successful is his mastery of tempo and meter. The patterns of his language use reveal a rhythm that constantly contrasts long winded lines with quick lines, sensual abstractions with every-day banalities, and beautiful, tangled metaphors with the courseness of natural speech. Ondaatje’s narratives are most often associated with his lyrical quality, but it is his ability to know how and when to bring his poetic style into sharp relief that I find most impressive.

I think of human beings as creatures of resistance. There is a part of us that always struggles against that which is manifest. When we are confronted with courseness we demand poetry; when we are confronted with poetry we demand violence. I think of a writer as someone who is able, like Ondaatje, to anticipate the rhythms of a reader’s resistance, someone who manipulates language in such a way that every drop feels urgent and essential.