THE CHILDREN ARE READING
Gabriel Fried opens his most recent collection, The Children Are Reading,
with these lines: “Where have the children gone this time? / There they
are, behind the house, / standing in a cautious arc / around the
flowers we warned them about.” The Children Are Reading
inhabits childhood spaces, physical and imaginative, on either side of
the emergence of adult awareness, desires, and anxieties—which isn’t to
say desires and anxieties don’t exist on the childhood end of the
spectrum. In many ways, those are more emphatic, less mitigated in the
poems, unconstrained by the delusions and rationalizations of adulthood. The poems are at once bounding toward, admiring of, and anxious about those childhood spaces, sliding back and forth along the continuum of childhood/adulthood on which fears of imaginative spaces crystallize and fluctuate. It would be inaccurate to think of adulthood as the place where wisdom pools in these poems, though it’s in adulthood that some of the fears are reconceived and articulated. Fried shows us that there are powers and wisdoms held in childhood that are lost in adulthood, even with its increased autonomy of one sort or another.
from The Children Are Reading
We stand in the sliver
of shadows the circles
from streetlights make.
We are almost out
too far, in a space
barely safe and daring;
ensphered in night,
its creature comforts,
a darker shade of night
around it.
Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Missouri. Join us the third Tuesday evening of each month during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.
