“I was starved for love / Now I’ve just had an abortion” the speaker of Monica McClure’s “Luxe Interiority” reports matter-of-factly in the opening lines of the poem. She sits in the waiting room of a minor emergency center and describes this medical setting through the unexpected lens of fashion (“I see only what I know to be baroque”), noting her social worker’s eyeliner, the celebrity wedding in the W Magazine she’s flipping through, and the fact that it’s Mercedes Benz Fashion Week. As the poem veers from the waiting room into the speaker’s mind, she expresses her desires and limits: She longed for romantic love; isn’t interested in attending fashion week; wants “to be a part of culture / while remaining without”; doesn’t want to be pregnant; refuses to be “stuffed full of myth”; and wants to be photographed as a fashion model.

The interiority of the poem is luxe because the speaker is thinking about fashion and French theory rather than evincing a culturally sanctioned emotional response. The permissible affective states for a person who has just had an abortion might include guilt and regret on the one hand, and relief and a sense of empowerment on the other. Instead, about a third of the way through the poem, our speaker remarks: “Michel Foucault says / there is no such thing as outside / But that’s exactly / where I need this thing to be”—a fetus presumably being the “thing” she wants “outside” of her body. Some readers might find this statement shocking, disconcerting, or even offensive; these reactions demarcate the limits of acceptability. McClure’s irreverent, blasé, gurlesque tone exposes and defies the idea that certain emotions—weighty, earnest ones—are the proper responses to having had an abortion.

When Foucault said “there is nothing outside discourse,” he argued that our speech, our thinking-in-language, and our subjectivity is always already formed by the power dynamics of discourse. Language and other cultural structures dictate social norms, determining what can be spoken, by whom, and in what circumstances. By invoking Foucault, however seemingly flippantly, McClure demonstrates her awareness of the discourses that limit the range of acceptable affective states for post-abortion contemplation. By punning on the concept of “outside,” referencing the outside of her speaker’s body, she suggests that discourses outline themselves in the shape of women’s bodies as ways to bind and control; at the same time, she transgresses these strictures through her speaker’s aberrant attitude. Her luxe interiority, both superficial and intellectual, blasts open the possibility of an outside.

McClure’s feminist outside is given further form in the receptionist who screams “I’m a crazy witch!” eight lines from the end of the poem. The receptionist is a crazy witch to begin with, apparently, and she’s announcing it loudly at the clinic, to boot. She is the woman far outside the bounds of social propriety—even farther than the woman who is nonchalant about just having had an abortion. The receptionist’s outburst causes the speaker to throw up her Valium and to find herself, suddenly and reluctantly, inside the world of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room”: “Why should ‘I’ be in Massachusetts / scared shitless by the subjectivity of regular folks / their paranoid existences,” McClure’s speaker asks, as if she’s been teleported against her will into Bishop’s 1918 waiting room in Worcester, Massachusetts. [1] There, a seven-year-old girl named Elizabeth sits, paging through National Geographic while her aunt sees the dentist, eventually becoming “scared shitless” and experiencing what I think of as a panic attack of subjectivity.

The scare quotes around McClure’s “I” suggest that our speaker’s interiority has been filtered through poetic tradition—perhaps ye olde anxiety of influence; or, in this case, a subjectivity-panic-attack of influence—and that it is specifically her lyric “I” that has been transported into Bishop’s poetic waiting room. “Why should ‘I’ be in Massachusetts” is a way of saying: “How did I become a woman speaking in a poem from a waiting room, aware of my antecedent Elizabeth Bishop, who writes about her first disorienting sense of self, her sudden ‘I’?” Bishop’s speaker asks a similar question:

But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.

Why should you be one, too?

“Why should you be one, too?” Elizabeth asks, meaning “one of them,” the townspeople and her own family. The poets’ emphases are different—McClure’s on the “I,” Bishop’s on the why—but they both ask: How did I get to be in this body, in this room? How is it that I came to exist as this particular person in this specific situation? “How unlikely,” Bishop writes. “Nothing stranger could ever happen” than bursting into one’s sense of self among what McClure calls “regular folks.”

“Luxe Interiority” alludes to “In the Waiting Room” elsewhere: the speaker pages through W Magazine instead of Elizabeth’s National Geographic; the word “Interiority” nods to subjectivity as the central concept of Bishop’s poem and possibly references the interior location of the exclamation that is the turning point of both poems. Elizabeth at first thinks the exclamation belongs to her aunt, in pain in the dentist’s chair (“Suddenly, from inside, / came an oh! of pain / —Aunt Consuelo’s voice—”), but she soon realizes that it’s coming from her own body:

What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.

When we first read the word “inside,” we are meant to imagine the inside of the treatment room as opposed to the “outside” of the waiting room. But “inside” actually turns out to mean the inside of the body (“my voice, in my mouth”), as in “Luxe Interiority.” Hearing what she’d thought to be her aunt’s voice inside her own body, Elizabeth then merges with Aunt Consuelo: “Without thinking at all / I was my foolish aunt.” This imagined ventriloquism, along with Elizabeth’s subsequent inability to tell where she ends and her aunt begins, is what hurls her into her subjectivity panic attack: a “sensation of falling off / the round, turning world / into cold, blue-black space.”

In “Luxe Interiority,” the turning-point-via-exclamation occurs when the receptionist’s scream causes the speaker to throw up her Valium. Because McClure’s speaker simultaneously occupies the space of Bishop’s waiting room, we’re invited to read the receptionist as the speaker’s double in “Luxe Interiority.” If Elizabeth is to Aunt Consuelo as McClure’s speaker is to the receptionist, then the receptionist’s scream also belongs to our speaker—who, of course, voices it in the poem. The receptionist throws her voice into the speaker’s mouth (“my voice, in my mouth”), prompting a gag reflex.

Enter Kristeva, who is not named, but whose presence is felt alongside Foucault’s (and Lacan’s, via the concept of “lack”). Kristeva’s theory of the abject in Powers of Horror describes vomiting as a response to the inability to distinguish between self and other, inside and outside. The abject speech of the receptionist is expelled from the speaker’s body along with so much Valium, and this chain reaction is so disruptive as to tear a hole in poetic space-time. When the screaming and vomiting are followed immediately by the statement “Why should ‘I’ be in Massachusetts,” abjection has caused inside and outside, self and other to blur: The speaker becomes, at once, the “I” of “In the Waiting Room,” the “I” of the receptionist, and the “I” of lyric subjectivity.

At first, McClure’s speaker seems resentful of the receptionist’s scream for throwing her into Bishop’s poem when she could be living a more glamorous life as a model: “could be getting photographed / in a nude bodysuit in a white room.” But then, in the final line of the poem, she makes room for and accepts the scream outside discursive limits: “But if that’s what she wants to put out there, ok.” This acceptance of what the receptionist has “put out there” seems utterly casual. But in the context of the poem—an intertextual, abject space where self and other break down—this understated “ok” suggests a kind of reconciliation of the banished self, a reintegration of the woman who is cast out for deviance and excess—whether she’s too loud, too crazy, or has just had an abortion and feels pretty blasé about it.

These questions of where the self exists—inside or outside of the body, in many bodies or in just one—are not merely philosophical but also highly political, of course, when it comes to the subject of abortion. By integrating the crazy witch into the subjective space of the poem—by saying “ok”—McClure dissolves distinctions between inside and outside, between self and other, between what must be contained in a woman’s body (a fetus, a scream) and what is allowed “out there,” opening a poetic space, and perhaps a discursive outside, that does not repress or police the outré emotions, language, or desires of the wild self.





Notes

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[2] Bishop, Elizabeth. “In the Waiting Room.” Poets.org. https://poets.org/poem/waiting-room.