August 18, 2006
Lesson Plan: Angel Island Poems
The following are some questions about the Angel Island poems that an instructor or TA could use to prompt class discussion. One approach I recommend is to have students form small groups and come up with answers which they then share with the class. Alternatively, you could focus one whole class around one of these questions. For example, I ran a 45 minute class discussion on the “Line between graffiti and art” question by bringing in photocopies of images from the graffiti websites and getting students to debate whether or not they thought those images were art.
Discussion Points
1. Art as a means of political expression. Brainstorm forms of contemporary art (movies, songs, poems, paintings, cartoons, etc.) that have either an explicit or implicit political agenda. Why might music/poetry/painting carry more persuasive force than a newspaper editorial or a political essay? Why use art to communicate a political message?
2. The line between graffiti and art. How do we determine whether or not a piece of work is “art”? Is graffiti art? Why or why not? Why do you think graffiti is illegal? Why are some forms of art legal and others illegal? Do the Angel Island Poems, which were written by anonymous and often uneducated detainees, have legitimate literary value?
Web Resources on Graffiti as a Political Tool
Art Crimes: The Writing on the Wall: This site provides photos of graffiti from all over the world. You can search by country.
http://www.graffiti.org/Pictures of Walls: A sometimes-humorous, sometimes-serious site where users can submit photos of writing on walls.
http://www.picturesofwalls.com/
3. Lost in translation. Do we lose anything by translating the Angel Island Poems into English and including them in an anthology of American poetry? What does the context in which these poems were written (in other words, the fact that they were written on a wall in a detention center) add to the message of the poems? If you were an editor for the Heath Anthology of American Literature, how would you represent these poems, or would you exclude them entirely from your anthology?
4. The poetics of error. Many of the poems written on the walls at Angel Island are difficult to separate from each other since they sometimes appear to blend together. In addition, several of the poems include grammatical and historical mistakes, as they were often written by detainees with little education. Should these mistakes in the writing and interpretation of the poems be included in an anthology? What might errors such as these add to the political, social or literary value of the poems?