by Jeffrey Niblack
Photo from Unremembered website
Sarah Kirkland Snider's Unremembered has its U.S. premiere March 11 at Ted Mann Concert Hall in Minneapolis as part of the SPCO's Liquid Music Series. The text of Snider's song cycle was written by poet and artist Nathaniel Bellows, and his drawings, interleaved with photography and video, will be projected as part of the performance.
Bellows is the author of two novels, Nan and On this Day, as well as a book of poetry, Why Speak?. He also is a prolific artist, posting his art and sketches frequently to his Tumblr page.
Additionally, Bellows is a musician – in 2016 he released an album entitled The Old Illusions. Below is a video for the song "The Reason" from the album featuring Bellows' drawings.
In his work, Bellows often evokes images of growing up in New England, focusing on landscapes and structures. He vividly describes these places, but there's also a sense of the specific emotional meaning attached to these places for him. Bellows discussed finding inspiration from his memory of the New England landscape in an interview on the website Largehearted Boy:
I am definitely influenced and inspired by the New England landscape—the seaside and the marshes, meadows, forests, and orchards. The whole area has a haunted quality that I've always felt very deeply, which has infiltrated all of my work, like a reoccurring main character. There's something about the rough bleakness of the winter, and the almost primordial fecundity of the summer that makes you feel both at the mercy of the natural world, and that you've been invited to viscerally experience the raw beauty of its extremes.
His writing style is deceptively direct. His poetry can read like prose, with strong elements or narrative or character. However, as the poems unfold, he gradually introduces something mysterious or even supernatural.
Nathaniel Bellows image for "The Estate" from Unremembered website
One of the striking themes of Bellows' writing is a tension between nostalgia and some of the more negative emotions buried behind that nostalgia: sadness, regret, or fear. A memory in his writings may begin quaint or ruminative, but turns darker and more sinister. The closing stanza of "The Estate", the second part of Unremembered, begins with an anthropomorphized view of a natural setting that seems peaceful, but quickly turns into something ghostly and terrifying.
The field has breath, the pond a voice
I’ve known since I was small
They told me then to leave this place
Or stay and lose it all
His novel, On This Day, examines similar themes of memory as it examines a brother and a sister who have recently lost both their parents. As they deal with their grief, they often visit their memories, sometimes tangibly as they spend a little too much time in the house in which their parents died. The novel moves back and forth in time, so there's a palpable sense of the past's impact on the present.
The poem "Some Traditions" from Why Speak? presents similar images of a house abandoned, maybe to be sold or perhaps to be left alone and rot, closing with the following:
The radiators stood in an awkward swirl.
No more days of crinoline or hedges shaped
like fish and bears. The curtains came down and were
shredded, twisted, stuffed under doors.
The piano remained in the hall, like an obelisk,
as if to haunt the place we had to leave;
it would have played on its own, we knew,
had we not robbed it of its keys
Unremembered closes with a beautiful concluding section entitled "The Past," the text of which ruminates on our difficultly separating from the past, the need to reconcile oneself to change, and the impact that memories have on our lives.
Nathaniel Bellows image for "The Past" from Unremembered website
The meadow lost its golden hue
The trees let go their leaves
The air grew colder, cleaner, blue
Pale as centuriesSomeone breathed into my ear
The vapor of the dead
It woke me up, I was asleep
It circled round my headIt all comes back inchoate
The meaning has no base
I never learned to love someone
The way I did that place
Sarah Kirkland Snider's: Unremembered will be presented at Ted Mann Concert Hall in Minneapolis, MN on Saturday, March 11 at 8:00pm.
Tickets and details here: http://www.liquidmusicseries.org/snider-unremembered/
Students and kids attend FREE.
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