The Paris Review - Fall 2016

has left me in a great confusion of mind. Sometimes I’m quite satisfied with
the confusion and sometimes I’m deeply mortified by it. It ought not to be
in quite such a state of perpetual jeopardy. The process of composing it was
very peculiar and discrepant.
INTERVIEWER
Tell us about the process of writing the poem.
PRYNNE
In the spring of 2011, I had one of these feelings that I sometimes have, that
maybe I’m about to write something. Maybe something’s coming along. I
had no idea what it might be, I just thought, Well, something is in the works.
And the more I thought about it, the more I had no idea what it might be.
I wasn’t sure I needed to know. Maybe I needed to clear a space to decide
what it was going to be, without making any preemptive allocations. And so
I resolved this in a way that I’d never done before: I decided to compose in a
completely alien environment. What this meant was that I needed to leave
my comfortable home and all my usual appurtenances—books and papers
and reference material and all the rest of it. It would mean going to a foreign
country. It would mean going to a country in which the spoken language was
not English, where I didn’t know a single word of the spoken language of this
new environment. It’d have to be reasonably economical to get there, and reasonably
economical to spend some time there. It might have been Finland;
but I chose to go to Thailand, because I’d been to Thailand once before.
I arranged and clocked into an hotel, a very modest, cheap hotel in
Bangkok, with the sole purpose of writing whatever this composition was
going to be. And right up to the last minute I had no idea whether it would
be anything at all. I took with me a mountain of paper and pencils, my
laptop—in order to verify certain sorts of material I might want to lean
on—and one book. The book choice surprised me and it would totally surprise
you, because it was a very recently published textbook concerning a
particular species of weak molecular forces known as van der Waals forces.
When I saw that this book, V. Adrian Parsegian’s Van der Waals Forces: A
Handbook for Biologists, Chemists, Engineers, and Physicists, had been published
by the Cambridge University Press, I just knew it was going to be an
important book to me. I couldn’t tell you why, but I’d already encountered
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