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I would have to say my thinking is similar to rchauhan's when thinking of the role of words and experience/story.

The way I've been thinking of it is like this: "Lifting Belly" doesn't tell us a story, it introduces us to an experience. Not with the words and their definitions, but with the sound and feelings that the words give to us.

Thinking about the picture activity we did in class on Thursday, we each saw the same image, but what made our reaction to the picture different to that of "Lifting Belly" is that we each wrote our own story in our minds about what we had seen, and what that might have brought up in our minds in terms of memory, personal experience, fantasy, imagination, etc. There is the potential for endless possibilities in terms of stories that could result from looking at this photograph.

I think that difference in the words we read from "Lifting Belly" and the photograph we saw in class and our experience with that is that Stein had a specific experience/sensation in mind for us to feel for ourselves with her words. She wanted us to feel that sensuality, experience the "sexiness." I also don't think that she was trying to tell us a "story" or lead us to some particular event, but she did have something in mind that she tried to re-create with the sequencing and selection of her words.

Photographs may be shot in a way that are meant to evoke certain sentiments, but in general, a word will evoke something more specific than an image. A word has more socialized content: there is a broad connotation that goes with certain words. With a photograph, words will be raised, but for every person they will be different, and the stories that may also be evoked will be different. In a story or poem, the words are presented for you to experience, as pre-selected by the author.

Does this resonate and/or make sense? I feel like that was super-duper abstract, haha...