"Children need art to better express the things caught within them. No Children need art to better..."

“Children need art to better express the things caught within them. No

Children need art to better understand

That there are things that require expression. No

Children need art to better think their way toward understanding

Their faults, not those of their broken supplies

Nor the embodiment of the bisexual vegetable. No

Children need art to frame the battling crests of contemporary motion. No

Children need art to commandeer a sense of history

For their own senses. No

Children need art to outpace the bullish avalanche of history. No

Children need art to abandon the idea that history is an expression of things —

the saucers look nice, as do the wigs and Portuguese guns, but history as shown

in this castle is nothing if not infinitely replaceable. Art, however, is eternally

salient, gives not color to history but history to itself, and is what we have to

represent both the radiation and shadow of history”

- excerpted from “Poems,” by Brandon Shimoda and found in his book Portuguese. What I love here is the resounding “No” that comes at the end of so many lines. For my reading, it can act syntactically as “No, children need art…” or “No. Children need art…” or even the contrary “No children need art…” All these readings can fit. In fact, their senses braid into one another. Shimoda is arguing about this privileged perspective art has for children, and so saying that children need art to see that perspective in them while at the same time saying that no child needs art to know he or she has a unique perspective seems very apt to this mysterious quality we attribute to children. Their “innocence.” The poem is actually more a statement about race, and how we could possibly learn from children how to understand race. But this portion I especially love for its statement about the power of art.