Ontological Necessities [Paperback]

The surrealist André Breton’s lover and muse, Nadja, has had very limited recognition. Uppal offers up a corrective, to make Nadja more than an ancillary to Breton, but without embodying her via determinate language or a language of mastery, for that would mean behaving in a manner similar to that of Breton (I think here of Emerson’s famed poem, “The Sphinx”, which concludes: “Who telleth one of my meanings, / Is master of all I am”).
Perhaps an aesthetically moral portrait of Nadja depends upon an elusive and fragmentary approach. “Nadja, Who Are You?” the first poem in Priscila Uppal’s Ontological Necessities, attempts just such a thing. Uppal’s poem is not brilliant-it depends, for example, too much upon the affected surreal juxtaposition-but the way it behaves (asking questions without expecting an answer) is appropriate to the subject matter. There are other common thematic interests and concerns, beyond that of Nadja, between Elmslie and Uppal. Uppal, too, writes from a feminist subject position. But Uppal’s hostility (particularly towards “the boys”) is interesting in so far as it is overt and felt and almost dangerous. What distinguishes Uppal from Elmslie is Uppal’s “public” stance. I suspect Uppal is less interested in personalised narratives of trauma and drama because such narratives are symptomatic of some greater underlying public disease.
Her hostility, however, is not without problems. At its peak, it’s expressed through a snobbish authoritarian tone. Most often, the object of her poetry’s derision is men or, rather, the “masculine impulse”. “Eighteen” addresses how women-especially young women- are perceived through distorted, highly-sexualized looking glasses. The poem’s narrative ends with these ominous lines: “[The men] waited for her to turn nineteen. Then, you understand, they would really have some fun”. In “The Peculiar Deaths of Women Writers”, the speaker makes her complaint:

They take it well, though, these ladies.
There few lines in the recovery anthologies.
The patronizing critics who imagine
each a famous bard’s sister in an alternate universe.
Their bios
like thank-you notes for the invitation to the party.

I wake up with D.T.s when I think of all those women, winning contests and giving up the prize, trying on
sever pseudonyms for size, squatting
like dead ducks for gentleman callers
to make a strategic choice.

But the speaker refuses to passively suffer a similar fate: “I'm not going down without a fight”. I can appreciate the sentiment. But I cannot forgive the poem's final line: “I’m not going down without a fight / no matter how many fraternity boys come out tonight” (emphasis mine). First of all, that fraternity boys have greater concerns than suppressing the poetry of Priscila Uppal seems worth mentioning. Second, yes, I recognize the use of “fraternity boys” is figurative, but Uppal’s determination to use such a figuration is an admission of distaste for “fraternity boys”; otherwise they wouldn’t be of any value here, would they? (Though to Uppal’s credit she does couches the hostility within a rather sing-song rhyming couplet). Most of all, they seem to be part of a female revenge-narrative. It works like so: safely situated in the glass-house of poetry, the female poet can throw stones at those boys who once inflicted pain. The most extreme example of this occurs in “What Johnny Won’t Read”:

Shakespeare or Waiting for Godot,
War and Peace, Daniel Defoe [. . .]
Movie subtitles, Chinese menus [. . .]

Excerpts from the 9/11 Commission [. . .]
Articles in Playboy
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms
STOP signs
This

Johnny (no doubt a frat boy!) is illiterate. He’s a xenophobe. He's politically unmotivated. He’s driven by libidinal impulses and said impulses are spurred on by pornographic visuals. He’s simultaneously fascist and anarchic. But in fact Johnny does not exist. He is just a construct that absorbs the speaker’s hostility. He must exist in order for poetry’s unacknowledged revenge narrative to function. As a construct, he is necessarily unsophisticated and cliché and flat; otherwise the snobbish hostility directed towards “him” would be much less amenable to readers’ sensibilities, I should think, and Uppal’s transparency much easer to see through.
That said, I do not wish to disparage Uppal too much, as there are a number of poems I very much enjoyed in Ontological Necessities. “Poodle in the Painting”, for example, concludes with these wonderfully macabre lines:

Never shot a poodle; but I will shoot
the poodle in this painting. We’ve not much
to say to each other and the night is very long.

“Cleaning the Piano” is uniquely idealistic, especially when compared to the rest of the collection:

It was the sort of party where people sing songs
and even those who don’t know the words
hum the tune. And neighbours stop fucking each
other
over and just start fucking.

That last line above offers a nice play on words, as does the following excerpt from the same poem (note the pun on “grand”):

Why must our host clean the piano?
Um, the entire guest list ended up, well -
the music so grand they had to get inside.

“No Angels in This Death Poem” unceremoniously rejects elegiac cliché: “Absolutely no angels in this death poem. Half-baked poets offer angels for consolation / the way neighbours offer fruitcake at Christmas”. Here, Uppal’s anger, reflected back upon poetry itself, becomes much more interesting and enlightening (see also “The Poem Can Be Completed By Anyone”). As an example of her humor, consider this poem title: “I’m afraid of Brazilians or Visiting the Ancestral Homeland is Not the Great Ethnic Experience Promised by Other Memoirs.” “Survey: What Have You Learned From Dying?” is unsettling and powerful in its simplicity and execution, offering answers to the title question such as “Flowers are uninspired gifts” and “I would have spent more summers at home.”
All this is to say that you should buy and read Ontological Necessities. It possesses a vigor and attitude absent in I, Nadja. I even recommend those poems I am opposed to philosophically for they show Uppal to be a poet who refuses to edit out her excess. Her best poems, I think, benefit from admitting into them a reckless abandon.
Alessandro Porco (Books in Canada)