Michael Ondaatje- The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

I read Billy the Kid for my ENGL5812 class- Ideas of the Western. I have always been a big fan of Ondaatje's, especially of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion, but this collection I found less appealing than his prose. In the back cover blurb, it states "In this remarkable composite of eye-witness accounts, tall tales, facts, forgeries, songs, and photographs, Michael Ondaatje conjures up Billy the Kid and the world he lived in, creating not only a powerfully moving portrait but also a more profound myth."
I suppose some of my discomfort comes from the fact that Ondaatje is fond of integrating other people's writing into his own poetry and prose so that it is difficult to know where his sources end and his own writing begins. He does the same in In the Skin of a Lion with Anne Wilkinson's character and poetry, and I find it disturbing. Perhaps I was too well brought up by the academic world which insists that one must always acknowledge one's sources. It may also come from some of the debates that we have, especially about collaborative writing, in deciding whose is the real "voice" in a work of poetry or prose. Whichever it is, it bothers me. Reading Billy the Kid was for me like reading Lacan; I can come away with a sense of what is going on, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you how I got there. I can feel Billy's madness, and that of his pursuer, Pat Garrett, and that of the men that they both travelled in company with. That crazy, surreal feeling was part of the West. I can't, however, properly pinpoint how and where Ondaatje creates that. I think it might take another reading to appreciate his poetic abilities and to reconcile myself with what on some level seems like plagiarism and a lack of creativity. The way the collection is put together is really creative, but I still have a bias toward poets who only use their own words. However, as a portrait of the wildness of the Wild, Wild West, Billy the Kid is well painted.