Synkroniciti is glad to welcome back poet, writer and musician Nerissa Nields of Massachusetts, with “Pantoum,” a poem exploring her experience as part of a traveling family rock band. She imagined the world unfurling before her: new towns, new faces, new possibilities glimpsed from the van window, and she expected this to be realized as they traveled. But the exhilaration of touring hardened into a pattern so predictable it felt less like freedom and more like enclosure.
“We chose the same motels, ate at the same franchises/ We might as well have been home/ More intent on the destiny than the journey/ We forgot that art is made from odd encounters.”
The pantoum form originated in Malaysia in the 15th century as the pantun berkait, and was later adapted by French and British writers thanks to the works of Victor Hugo. It consists of a series of quatrains, stanzas made up of four lines. The second and fourth lines of one stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the next stanza, creating a cyclical effect. It is a form built for echo, for drift, for the subtle shifts that occur when a line reappears in a new emotional light.
In “Pantoum,” that cyclical motion becomes a perfect vessel for exploring how touring can blur into monotony, how the promise of movement can paradoxically become a trap. The poem itself does not stagnate; its repetitions propel us forward with a sense of inevitability, each recurrence deepening our understanding of what it means to lose the spark of discovery and wonder.
Nerissa makes the form sing, turning repetition into revelation.
Read “Pantoum” in Synkroniciti’s Expectations, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Nerissa Nields is a writer and musician/songwriter living in Western MA. She’s a founding member of indie-rock band The Nields who have released 21 albums and toured North America. Her short fiction, non-fiction and criticism has appeared in Brevity, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, The Maine Review and American Songwriter, and forthcoming in the LA Review. She is the current chair for 30 Poems in November, a literary fundraiser for Center for New Americans, an organization that supports immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Western Massachusetts. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) at Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA (English) from Yale University. She is currently working on a novel about a family folk-rock band.