This should be said to Susan.
I find it really interesting, writing on the floor.
Lately, I’ve avoided writing at desks, and with them my laptop, to squat down to the floor and write in various yoga-esque positions.
Is it leaning over a piece of paper that has me using a marker instead of a pen?
Hmmm
Yes. Desks are steady and control is easy with any fine pen. On the floor, you’ve got all sorts of sway, bounce and rebound. There’s no sitting still!
The broad strokes of a marker claim legibility even when quickly scribed.
Anyway
I think it’s done something for me. Like, I’ve connected with the space of the poems differently.
Who reads books at a desk, anyway?
Oh wait, I do.
But there’s this atmosphere of reading books of poems on the floor, rolling on your back and sounding out lines of prosody direct into the floorboards, turning over and over to utter that is not what I meant at all * until you come across something you must stand to read. So it is with writing poems, too.
There’s a point when the discomfort of staying in a hunch disappears and words flow in place of pumped blood.
Eventually, you find the frozen plums in the icebox.**
T.S. I read for weeks at a desk. Saul Williams, I pace around my room reading loud enough the neighbors can hear.
The space of the poem dictates the poem.
Boom.
*From T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
**Blooped from William Carlos Williams’ “This is just to Say.”
Dan Dorman 