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I seem to be part of a majority when I say I could not begin to crack Lifting Belly. I read all sixty two pages, and I thought I felt that I could not understand it because I was out of the loop, like I was missing something. Lifting Belly felt really personal to me and I was not able to break throught that barrier.

Which is why I thought it was interesting to read Adrienne Rich's analysis of Dickinson. I know I should probably be writing about the gendering or ungendering of the subjects of Dickinson's poetry (by the way this is the first time I've read Dickinson) but I think Rich's insistince on making a connection with Dickinson most interesting. I loved this line:"For months, for years, for most of my life, I have been hovering like an insect against the screens of an existence which inhabited Amherst, Massachusets, between 1830 and 1886". We've come across this line before in our reading (I don't remember where) and it stuck with me. It reminds me of a line from my favorite Allen Ginsberg poem "A Supermarket in California". The paranthetical line goes: I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd. I know I've felt this inadequacy when trying to reach back to an artist that's touched me and it's interesting to her it from two artists point of view.