If you wanted to cover some short stories and poems in middle school

[conuly]

which ones would you pick? Public domain preferred, but if there's a super great anthology out there, I'm good with that too.

Comments

[kyrielle]

The classics, which I think are pretty well covered here. I'd also be tempted to cover one of my favorite (youth-appropriate) modern poems, Marvin Bell's "To Dorothy" (which happens to be posted, legitimately, on the internet).

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/dorothy

http://angelapoems.blogspot.com/2013/03/to-dorothy-by-marvin-bell.html has some analysis which I find somewhat amusing because it is, of course, a reasonable interpretive reading of the poem, but I attended a workshop run by Mr. Bell a number of years ago in which he explained the genesis of the poem. He wanted to write a love poem to his wife, Dorothy, and he did not want it to be trite or sappy. He figured that if he wrote down "You are not beautiful, exactly," he would be rather forced to dig his way out and certainly not to go into the easy cliches. It cracked me up.

And "You are not (positive quality), exactly" as a starter could be an interesting exercise, if you have them try writing poetry.

[conuly]

And "You are not (positive quality), exactly" as a starter could be an interesting exercise, if you have them try writing poetry.

I don't know if I could do that.

When I was in high school, my ineffective English teacher assigned us to write poems in the style of Sonnet 130. He might have had the good sense to remind everybody not to write them towards actual people. You can see where this is going, I'm sure. He couldn't, but then, he wasn't a terribly good teacher. At the bare minimum he should've read the damn things before letting people read them aloud - or stopped them before it went too far.

So, the whole thing gives me flashbacks.