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

[adrian_turtle]

What poetry did they do in elementary school? Have they already covered Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Robert Louis Stevenson? (There is some value in going back and seeing more deeply into a poem they read when they were younger, but you'll want to go beyond that.)

I remember we did Shirley Jackson in middle school, or maybe 9th grade, and that's got to be public domain by now. And the short story version of "Flowers for Algernon." I'm not sure about its legal status, but you might want to have them read "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas." When I was a kid, we did some Jack London and Ray Bradbury stories every year from but those did not age well. You might prefer to use O Henry or Sherlock Holmes. Or Rex Stout, maybe?

[siderea]

When I was a freshman(? or was it senior year?) in high school, my English class had a poetry textbook I remember as being quite excellent: Sound and Sense. Note there are multiple editions, including recent editions where the editorship has been taken over by two new people (and the book retitled Perrine's Sound and Sense.

Looking over reviews of various edition (we used whatever was available in 1986-1989 – can't comment to which edition to get), this seems to be a particularly beloved book by teachers and students alike. It has the singular claim to fame to be both prized by poetry lovers and people who came to it poetry haters. There are reviewers saying that they got the book because it was such a dense anthology of excellent poetry, figuring they'd ignore the textbooky bits, but then really liking the didaction; there are people who said they hated poetry until they read this book and learned how to appreciate poetry.

I remember it introduced me to Auden and Aiken, which in retrospect, damn, wouldn't have expected that in a high school textbook. Yates, Houseman, Hughes, Tennyson, Dickinson, Frost, Shakespeare, Cullen, etc, etc, etc.

[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.

[snakeling]

For short stories, Saki is great and public domain. There's Arthur Conan Doyle, of course.

If you want to tackle non-English-speaking authors, Guy de Maupassant is a good one (I can't comment on the translations, though), so are Prosper Mérimée (La Vénus d'Ille) and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (Vera).

There's this on Wikisource : https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Stories_by_Foreign_Authors

I can't comment on the non-French ones, but the French choices seem quite good to me.

[snakeling]

Oh, and this one is a must-read in middle school in France: https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/3793.htm

It's more or less a longer version of the Niemöller poem, but it's well written, and it's a good prop to talk about fascism.

[conuly]

Good advice on the anthology, thanks.

[conuly]

Formally in elementary school it was a lot of Shel Silverstein. They don't really push poetry in elementary, and they were still enrolled in schools then.

[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.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

That's a huge question. What exactly do you mean by 'cover'? Are you going with "a fleeting overview of 50 best-known poems of Britain and America", or "poems you ought to know by heart before you major in English Literature at Bryn Mawr", or something in between? 'Middle school' is three years - are you structuring a lesson-plan for the entire three years at once, or do you have a theme for each year (or semester?) or what?

I highly recommend greatpoets; all kinds of good stuff there. Enjoy!

[conuly]

Not sure. Mostly, I think I want to take one year with both girls and cover well-known poems and short stories that are age appropriate and reasonably accessible, interspersing that with longer works of literature.

(Maybe I just want an excuse to read Ransom of Red Chief with them.)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

O. Henry is good. Saki, Kipling and Mark Twain have some rollicking tales too. In my adolescence, I read every Ray Bradbury story I could get my hands on: a lot of them scared the heck out of me, but I loved them. Ursula LeGuin's short stories are amazing.

Poets: start with Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Are your girlies good enough readers that you can just turn them on to a poet or author, and then sit back and let them search out and devour as much as they like? If not, maybe start with Shel Silverstein, Dorothy Parker and/or Ogden Nash.

[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