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

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I'd run with Silverstein, then split the poetry section in two-- one for analysis and one for comprehension, sort of. So you grab poems they already know and talk about symbolism and such more thoroughly, and poems they don't (John M Ford comes to mind) to understand the forms. Jo Walton has some available in various forms, and Pop Sonnets could be good as a way to understand what sonnets are doing.

Maybe give them this one, too, and see when they get it. http://tolkien.cro.net/talesong/merryinn.html