Belly in the air
Published in January of this year by não (edições), “A Barriga no Ar” introduces us to the poetry of Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), a central figure of the avant-garde movements that stirred the waters in the first decades of the 20th century.
Unpublished until 1953, “Lifting Belly” finally appeared in the volume “Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces (1913 to 1927)”, a collection of early compositions that already reveal an Author in full command of strategies aimed at undermining the conventions of lyric poetry, celebrating the freedom of a sung eroticism in its multiple possibilities:
«The belly in the air is a permanent caress.
The belly in the air is bored.
Don't tell me.
Belly in the air now.
Cow.
The belly in the air is exact.
I've been with this thing many times.
The belly in the air is necessarily adventurous»
Divided into three parts, the poem presents a fairly accessible lexicon, despite the discourse tending towards a confusion of meanings that places the interlocutors of the poem on an intimate, apparently domestic plane, talking aimlessly about their lives and the world. ““Lifting Belly” is the couple, but also the language and the act of composing the text that will come to define the couple,” argues the poet Christine Scanlon in the essay “Lifting Belly: The Language of (In)Visibility” (2013).
Born in the United States of America, the Author moved to France in 1903 and settled there.
She is buried in Père Lachaise, among half the world she lived with in life. She was a student at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine before giving up the course to become an art collector, thus making acquaintances with Picasso, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Matisse, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Picabia, Apollinaire, among so many other leading figures in a society dominated by men who then looked with astonishment and repudiation at the suffragettes' claim to the right to vote.
