Abortion’s Poetic Figures

How does poetry figure abortion? Perhaps the most influential and enduring critical examination of this question comes from Barbara Johnson's essay "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion." Johnson's essay turns to poetic apostrophe, arguing that as a figure structured by elements of animation, loss, and absence, apostrophe is a key vehicle for considering "questions of life and death" in poetry.1 Reading a series of poems about abortion by Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton, Johnson considers the way these poems limn the "boundary between life and death" as it is "blurred" through poetic apostrophe.2 She argues that these poems elaborate a "split self-accusingly or intra-symbiotically" as the fundamental drama of abortion driving this apostrophic turn.

Johnson's essay opens apostrophe to the question of reproductive politics, offering a model for considering the mutual imbrication of the inner workings of poetics and the rhetorical framing of the political issue of abortion rights. Johnson asks, "are the politics of violence already encoded in rhetorical figures as such? In other words, can the very essence of a political issue — an issue like, say, abortion — hinge on the structure of a figure?"3 For Johnson, what emerges in these apostrophic poems is a necessary politics of "undecidability": a politics, Johnson suggests, that is at the center of abortion debates, where determining the viability of the fetus, the beginning of life, is essential.

These poems underscore the fundamental undecidability of viability as they detail the ambivalent, agonized responses of the mother in her apostrophic call. Johnson writes that "the questions these poems are asking, then, is what happens when the poet is speaking as a mother — a mother whose cry arises out of — and is addressed to — a dead child."4 By describing the essential representational dynamics of abortion as expressed in this address from a mother to a "dead child," Johnson orients abortion representation around that most familiar and overdetermined of social categories: mother and child.

Yet what if abortion is an act, a situation, an experience that fundamentally resists such ascriptions? What if the position of "mother" and "child" are precisely what abortion — as a deconstructive act — calls into radical question? As Johnson indicates, there is a politics in her essay, but it is not one that leads toward imaginations of reproductive freedom or that opens prospects for how poetic figure might engender such an imaginary. By framing abortion in the language of "violence" and "death," Johnson's essay calls forth a language of abortion politics that already cedes essential ground to anti-abortion rhetorics.

Like Johnson, I'm interested in how the poetics of abortion and their figurative work offer distinctive approaches to experiential, social, and political realms. In this essay, I return to the essential connections Johnson draws between poetic figure and abortion, but I redirect them to highlight what remains unaccounted for in Johnson's high drama of apostrophic abortion poetics. My brief essay focuses on a remarkable contemporary book of poems, Abby Minor's As I Said: A Dissent (2022), which "dissents" from narratives of trauma, violence, and silencing that so often accompany abortion discourse. Minor's "dissent," the title playing on the putatively neutral language of law, offers a brief in the form of poetry, indicating that it is poetic form and figure that can capture the fullness of the lived complexities of abortion. As I Said: A Dissent develops a repertoire of poetic figures — metonymy, address, preterition — that represent the range and texture of abortion as a material condition.

Composed of a series of long poems that consider abortion from a prismatic, multivocal perspective, As I Said: A Dissent stitches together images of time, galaxies, flowers, jewels, and fragmented testimonies from past and present. One long poem in the center of the collection considers the powerful life and work of nineteenth century abortion provider Madame Restell (Ann Lohman); another poem gathers a series of voices into a braid of funny, intimate, charged dialogues about abortion; and two impressionistic pieces convey a first-person exploration of abortion in relation to the speaker's larger life: familial, social, erotic, cerebral, situated in place. These poems center the complex experiences of the person who is pregnant but will soon not be; who is in the process of terminating a pregnancy; who has undergone an abortion; who hears of other abortions; who provides abortions to others or assists with the process. This multidimensional perspective finds expression as a book-length exploration of what Minor calls the "collective pronoun of hers" - "h/ours."5

This complex collective expression "dissents" from what Lauren Berlant calls the dominant politics of "fetal motherhood," which reduces the living being of the pregnant person to a minor figure in relation to the dominant agent of the fetus.6 In these poems, by contrast, the reproductive body in a threshold moment engenders a different account of personhood that underscores the multivocal and anonymous, the intergenerational and the intimate, the "arrangements / of time," the forms of "power, mercy, and wisdom" that emerge and recede again in abortion experiences.7 

Such portrayals refuse narratives of origins and outcomes in favor of a lateral poetics: a poetics of appearing, transforming, passing by, dissolving. Through its deconstructive figurative work, this poetics opens a different account of abortion representation beyond the impasses of apostrophe and the explanatory dimensions of narrative. It offers one way of imagining an abortion politics that emphasizes what theorist Sophie Lewis calls "liberatory modes of care," one that understands abortion as a relational act of "family abolition" amidst ongoing heteropatriarchal dominance.8

Metonymy

We might begin with a rose, or a galaxy. In As I Said: A Dissent, these figures recur, emerging not as deep metaphorical image but as imprint that connects with and extends from the experience at hand.

A rose, a lemon, rain are metonyms, something held in the eye or mind, close to or inside the self, something drawn into the scene. Metonymy is the figure that draws entities into proximity, that develops associations and relations of contiguity. What is one close to? What does something touch? What is inside what? What brings forth or mixes with another? These figures allow Minor to scale in and out, to offer intricate tracings of relationality and to elaborate figures of bodily nurture and repair as key to abortion representation.

Lyn Hejinian writes of metonymy: "Metonymy moves attention from thing to thing; its principle is combination rather than selection. Compared to metaphor, which depends on code, metonym preserves context, foregrounds interrelationship . . . Metonymy moves restlessly, through an associative network in which associations are compressed rather than elaborated. Metonymy is intervallic, incremental — it exists within a measure. A metonym is a condensation of its context."9 In As I Said: A Dissent ambient figures of roses, lemons, water, rain, and blood offer such "condensations of context," figuring abortion and its material forms within broader cycles of birth, growth, diminishment, death. A womb is lemon-shaped; a woman wears a bathrobe with pink roses; a rose is the color and pattern of blood.

Minor's figures bear shapes of life that bleed into death, emerging and decaying, accumulating and shedding. These figures remind us that we exist always within these cycles of life and death, growing and withering. A woman describes a "rose my mother planted outside my father's death-room window": because of such things, she writes, "I have never felt alone with all these particles here, these tattered buds / smashing in the dark."10 She continues:

Minor's metonymies imbricate the vast and the delicate: the lemon-as-womb associated with the lemon-as-blood, the "tattered buds" of roses kindred to the "galaxies of roses" washed from the lover's shirt strips. They elaborate actions like tending and being tended, washing, cutting, planting, repairing. As any gardener knows, some things remain buried or do not grow: "Many things // never came up. Many things / remained beneath."12 Some things have to be "clipped" in order to grow, or for other things to emerge. Minor writes:

Bulbs and buds, rain and blood. Minor's book highlights matter close at hand, intermixed, the flowers coming up and the rain contiguous with the body beginning to bleed. Abortion here is powerfully reimagined as a part of feminized bodily life, as one thing that happens, or can happen, in the unfolding of embodied experience: a kind of "rain," a kind of "falling" away.

Minor's metonymic work also considers abortion in relation to astronomical elements, conveying reproduction, abortion, sexuality as mysteriously connected to broader planetary forces. Minor writes, "To me / the connections between a vagina and a supernova seem obvious."14 These astronomical images emerge as metonyms, figures for containment and holding as fundamentally mysterious. What passes through what? Blood mingles with dark matter. A tampon swirls into the Milky Way. What we are inside, what we are made of, more mysterious than we know: "Yet I've been created in the image of a great storm drain — / I wash   I accede  / what down pours."15 If bodies are grounded, organic, earthbound, they are also unknowable, a kind of dark matter in the universe. Through such images, Minor rewrites conservative religious discourses of the sanctity of life to frame the forces of reproduction and destruction not as metaphysical but as connected to a greater, inhuman, secular mystery: the very life of the universe.

Address

Who speaks and who is addressed in an abortion poem? In "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion," Barbara Johnson considers the ways address — and specifically apostrophe, the address to an absent or fugitive presence — works in lyric poetry. Johnson's pivotal question is whether poetic language can serve as means of reanimation in the face of loss or absence. She writes: "The final question becomes: can this gap be bridged; can this loss be healed, through language alone?"16 Reading Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "the mother," Johnson frames this question specifically in relation to abortion, writing that the poem "represents the impossible task of humanizing both the mother and the aborted children while representing the inadequacy of language to resolve the dilemma without violence."17 As the introduction to this cluster attests, there are other, more open-ended ways of reading Brooks's poem that understand its meanings as regarding the complex acquisition of knowledge and love. Minor's book, too, provides a "dissent" from apostrophic logic of negation and loss in its expansive and affirmative modes of collective address.

Refusing the apostrophic dyad of mother/child and its emphasis on absence, As I Said: A Dissent portrays dialogical relations of presence that extend from past to present. The central mediating practice of address in this volume is a documentary approach, from transcribing the voices of the writer's mother and grandmother to evoking the extraordinary life of abortion provider Madame Restell/Ann Lohman through the prism of newspaper stories and court testimony about her practices. The text itself holds an array of voices, encouraging the reader to listen carefully to what is and is not said. The addressee in these poems is often the book's author, who listens, transcribes, responds to the testimony of others. Through this use of address, the text foregrounds the act of listening as much as the act of speaking. It creates a literary experience of receiving, touching, taking in.

We might see in this extended form of address an invocation of what Virginia Jackson has called, in relation to Emily Dickinson's poetry and its modes of address, forms of "intersubjective practice," grounded in and returning to particular networks of relation.18 As Jackson writes, in such forms of writing, "a circuit of exchange in which the subjective self-address of the speaker is replaced by the intersubjective practice of the writer, in which the writer's seclusion might be mediated by something (or someone) other than ourselves."19 Against the tradition of a lyric circuit that meditates on individual solitude, Minor gathers in other voices who speak to her, directly or indirectly, and channels them through the book's pages. These voices — past and present, known and unknown — merge into a chorus, what Minor calls a "voiceriver." Minor writes: "I have come to see these spiritual lights not as individual rights, not as fireflies drifting to the shoddy melody of lineage, but as sediment, a soluble cluster drawn along. The voiceriver is filled with points of songlight, azalealight, garbagelight, smokelight . . . "20

Minor's long poem, "H/ours," directly reimagines the mother/child apostrophe as grounded in real conversation and as resolutely pluralized rather than singular. Weaving together multiple voices that engage in back-and-forth dialogue, "H/ours" portrays the abortion address as connected to feminized knowledge and storytelling across generations. Minor plaits together the voices and stories of her mother, Judith, and grandmother, Ruthie, as they describe the many layers of their lives alongside their abortion experiences. Ruthie, a Jewish woman growing up in the tenements in New York City, marching, selling hats, singing, raising children, had an abortion, a fact that is common knowledge in the family and that carries no sense of stigma or shame. The story of Ruthie's abortion is shared familial knowledge, a knowing that sits easily, lightly, alongside everyday textures of life: flowers, sidewalks, curlers. Minor writes:

"I just remember knowing," the mother says, a knowledge connected here not with sorrow and loss but with play, laughter, life. In turn, Judith's experience with abortion also emerges as part of this poem, a story that she tells directly to the daughter/author. Minor weaves together fragmented lines from Judith's testimony with extended scenes of gathering flowers, and homes in on one detail from her story: the doctor's mother holding her mother's hand: "She held / she held your hand to gather, to gather / flowers, to taste the powder / falling from the great tongues."22 Here again, Minor emphasizes presence rather than absence, mothers holding the hands of patients, voices talking and responding to each other, back and forth.

Where there is apostrophe in this work, it is directed not to a lost or absent child but to figures in the past "on the disobedient's path." Such forms of address to those who are no longer present serve as an acknowledgment of the ongoing force of these figures' acts of caregiving, an "after-glance" at the care-work they undertook to sustain life. Dr. Schecter, Minor's grandmother's doctor, is greeted in one poem; according to family conversation, he simply performed an abortion for the grandmother, Ruthie, with no fuss after Ruthie told him she didn't want to be pregnant. Minor writes:

Similarly, Minor's long poem about Madame Restell/Ann Lohman provides an extended celebration of this woman's life on this "path" of abortion providing. Like Dr. Schecter, Madame Restell is called into imaginative presence by the poem, a magisterial, electric woman in a "black silk gown." Restell's forceful voice closes the poem with a direct address to the reader, refusing her cultural conscription as agent of chaos and insisting on her power: "If I were only Chaos why / would I wear these jewels?"24

To think of a "voiceriver" instead of an apostrophe, calling forth rivers of voice that are "drawn along" from past to present, is to reimagine a lyric abortion poetics of absence and trauma as a polyvocal poetics of care that stresses the lives that were and are lived, the experiences that can be told, because of the practice of abortion. The collective hers — "h/ours" — becomes, in the closing lines of the book, a "we" "laughing": "we laughed / ourselves tender, laughed ourselves sick."25 The figure of address finds form here as a "sediment" of speakers, stories, and knowledge — gathering, passing along, letting go, laughing.

Preterition

Abortion and all its reverberating meanings and significance emerge across As I Said: A Dissent not via direct argument or exposition but through deliberately indirect means. Minor writes: "I thought I could write a story about my country and its bodies sans explication. To destroy explication with purple flowers. And after the destruction, to unfold the hours, to find the pinion-word in an acre of thought."26

Minor's portrayal of abortion across the text appears through preterition, that rhetorical figure in which something is foregrounded by seeming to pass over it. The layered, multiple meanings of abortion emerge by "destroying" the language of "explication" in favor of a more sustained invocation of forms of experience that emerge beyond facts, details, ideology, and narrative-legal and religious Minor sidesteps these known discourses of abortion, all fraught with the histories of antagonism and conflict that gather around the very word, in order to discern a different approach. To gather all the life around abortion, to tell of abortion through meditations on "purple flowers" and "hours" and "an acre of thought," is to hold space for other truths about "my country and its bodies."

This insistence on indirection is also, perhaps, a refusal of abortion story itself, if abortion stories are narratives that center abortion as exceptional moment or as a truth to speak directly. If the book contains many voices speaking of abortion, Minor's "voiceriver" recenters abortion within broader currents of life rather than as a story that stands out singularly. Preterition, as the figure that evokes what is and isn't said, or what is said by not being said, allows As I Said to insist on the ordinariness, the everydayness of abortion, within the currents of individual and collective lives — something that almost goes without saying. She writes: "What one of us does with a tansy pill is done."27

The poems, in turn, become a site for collecting all that falls away in storytelling. One piece, "Blood Dress: A Diary," is a sustained record of what isn't said in an abortion story and what the space of the poem might be able to hold, in a different register. She writes: "I went into a sadness / after I told my 'story' for the tape recorder, why hadn't I talked about my beloved's / eyelashes."28 The poem becomes a place for assembling what has been otherwise passed over.

Minor suggests that telling the story of her abortion would evoke a time, a context, a person who has now changed and who she cannot any longer directly access. She writes: "I'd still like to tell it now but I / is someone else."29 Perhaps an abortion story halts time into one knowable moment, or it renders the person as a certain kind of knowable being. Minor's abortion poetics, with its emphasis on preterition rather than storytelling, generates a text of experiments in gathering and dispersal, saying and not saying, pointing to what can no longer be said.

Coda: Abortion / Deconstruction

For Johnson, abortion's figures turn on elements of rupture and violence and the problem, and unknowable answer, of viability. The figures of abortion I have foregrounded in this essay via Minor's As I Said: A Dissent render abortion, instead, as an act of care and sustenance, one that further illuminates a whole realm of caregiving relations often obscured from view.

As Sophie Lewis writes in her recent book, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, this realm of relations "already nestles latently in the present," in "nooks and crannies" where "caregivers already seek to unmake . . . possessive love."30 Abortion providing and abortion receiving are acts of material refusal of the conscriptions of mandatory reproductive labor and the heteronormative ideologies of familial "possessive love." These spaces and acts, Lewis argues, enact a form of "family abolition" that open the way for other horizons of living to emerge. As Lewis points out, the family form is what she calls a "technology of privatization" of care and love: "a process of enclosure in which all kinds of families unintentionally participate."31 Family abolition, in turn, is necessarily linked to other forms of abolitionist politics, particularly in relation to carceral systems, and its commitment, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it, "to change one thing: everything."32

Abortion, in its very presence, serves as deconstructive figure for the normative politics and meanings of family as property relation and social form. As Minor puts it: "In their abstract figures, the mammoth, shining Kingdom of Family and the abject, bloody queendom of Abortion reign over the American landscape like movie stars."33 To turn to "Abortion" — to make a subject of its "abject, bloody queendom" — is, above all, to underscore its radical and powerful embodiment of carekeeping that refuses the family form. Minor writes, wryly: "Does Abortion do everything Family does only backward, in heels?"

And in turn, abortion evokes varied forms of life that emerge on the other side of such narratives of family and its normative modes of personhood. Abortion refuses, it unmakes, it does the Family narrative backward, inverting its premises. At the same time, it serves to illuminate other social forms of interdependence and purposeful living. What would it mean not to perceive feminized reproductive life in terms of negation, violence, absence: "not a lack and not // a burdened body"?34 What would it be like to consider abortion in these deconstructive terms? Minor's lateral poetics of abortion offer us a imaginative horizon to contemplate:

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Margaret Ronda is the author of a critical study on American postwar poetry and the genres of ecological crisis, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End (Stanford University Press, Post45 Series, 2018). She is also the author of two poetry collections. Her critical scholarship has appeared in journals including PMLA, American Literary History, Post45, Genre, and English Language Notes. Her public humanities writing has appeared in forums including Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books. She teaches American poetry, environmental literature and theory, and creative writing at the University of California-Davis.

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