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I was intrigued when someone (Julie, I think) said that Lifting Belly made her feel excluded, whereas I felt as though I had my own glimpse into this private world.  Now I don't know how I feel about it, about just how much I was allowed to see, and how much was only my own input.  When we tried to "understand" Lifting Belly, we got hung up on single words, trying to translate them and identify how exactly the metaphor was structured.  However, each of us sees every word differently.  Sometimes we approximated each other, and it even seemed as though we had the same idea in mind, but in reality, we were still nuanced by our own experience.  When we were discussing the poem in small groups, Eve mentioned that she felt excluded, too, but because if this was portraying lesbian sex, her own experience was so unlike it.  

When I began reading The Book of Salt, I immediately felt like I, as the reader, had been an instrument for GertrudeStein (love the mononame).  Binh explains on page 2, "My Mesdames enjoyed receiving guests, but also loved seeing them go. Many had arrived hoping for a permanent place around my Mesdames; tea table, but I always knew that after the third pot they would have to leave."  I took this to mean that they loved to include people, make them feel as though they were "in the circle," only to reveal they are irrelevant, like Serena the Soloist showed that "the man is irrelevant." Were we all just invited to get a small glimpse of Stein's world, drawn in and intrigued, only to be pushed out again by our own inability to understand?  And was I just another person stroking Stein's ego even after death, willing to claim she was the "brightest star in the Western sky?" 

I'll allow myself the conceit that when I said I loved the poem,  I wasn't praising Gertrude Stein's ability as a poet, but my own as a reader.   Hmph.