Isalie Posted January 19, 2016 Share Posted January 19, 2016 Hi I'm looking for some poetry to read with my 8th graders. The themes should be friendship, love or evil, any of the three, and if it's a classic that's good and if it's good that's even better. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Writhen Posted January 19, 2016 Share Posted January 19, 2016 My favorites are Poe (A Dream Within A Dream), Lovecraft (A Garden), and The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nuncle Stark Posted January 19, 2016 Share Posted January 19, 2016 All I ever knew was Robert Frost, Poe and Sylvia Plath. My education is sorely lacking haha. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jo498 Posted January 19, 2016 Share Posted January 19, 2016 Almost 20 years ago I got a Dover pbck "Best remembered poems" edited and annotated by Martin Gardner. This is not an edition by a professor of English (and has no "older stuff" like Shakespeare, Donne or Pope) but a very nice overview about fairly popular classics, mostly from the 19th and early 20th century and it was helpful and entertaining for someone with English as a second language. (I cannot be more specific with recommendations for the topics you mentioned.) ASIN: B007S6IJJS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ser Scot A Ellison Posted January 20, 2016 Share Posted January 20, 2016 Morri Creech This is his poem "Broken Glass" from his first collection of poety Paper Cathedrals: https://books.google.com/books?id=1buC2_iGuloC&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46&dq=morri+creech+broken+glass&source=bl&ots=ACnRXen9zw&sig=9dD33uuSnIZ6T84qwkDeSElpydI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjF6YfPq7jKAhUCHh4KHWujD8AQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=morri%20creech%20broken%20glass&f=false He was a Pulitzer prize finalist for third book of poetry The Sleep of Reason In 2014. It's really amazing stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ser Scot A Ellison Posted January 20, 2016 Share Posted January 20, 2016 Since I can't edit the doggone thing here's the poem in full: Broken Glass: In 1970 my father returned to the sweetness of desolation, wandering past rows of mobile homes, past the hulls of cars splayed in the wheatgrass that whiskered their silent engines, past the skeletons of stripped machines, dismantled harrows, to the pine grove where shattered glass gleamed beneath a bed of straw needles. I had never been there before, never seen the blazing fragments, small as I was, with a handful of rocks in my pocket for the moment when my father lined the bottles like years against a rotten stump and reared back to hurl the first stone. I had never seen him raise his hand against the world. But the emptied bottles of bourbon and scuppernong wine flashed beneath the trees, and he burned to splinter them all to a heap of slivers. He pitched the curve, the fastball, the slider, the knuckle. He left nothing intact, that man whose life was an arrangement of tools hung in a garage for repairing bush hogs and cultivators; his mind whirled beyond the gears of perfect machinery, and he reveled in the dust and gravity of human error, shouting as he threw each stone with all the rage he could muster. Feet planted firm, he ground the pitcher's mound dirt into his palms, rubbed them together, then wound up the side-wind and fractured the barrier between him and the weeds springing up around the dead-rooted pine, chanting the names of his heroes, those faded figures from the box of trading cards in his closet, chanting them in the language of failure, oblivious to me standing next to him, silent and afraid-- until at last he grew tired, hefted me onto his shoulders, and headed back toward the O-rings and gaskets that required his attention, back toward his ordered life, leaving the wreckage behind him, scattered and shining.[/quote] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muwhahaha Posted January 20, 2016 Share Posted January 20, 2016 At that age, I remember Henry Wadsworth Longfellow being my absolute favorite. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rubies & Jade Posted January 22, 2016 Share Posted January 22, 2016 Here are a few to consider: Friendship After Love by Ella Wheeler Wilcox Candles by Carl Dennis The Kiss or Sweetness by Stephen Dunn Gospel by Philip Levine The Sleepers by Walt Whitman Because I could not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson Numbers by Mary Cornish Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isalie Posted January 22, 2016 Author Share Posted January 22, 2016 Very thanks very much for your contributions, for newcomers: feel free to contribute if you like. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Killer Snark Posted January 25, 2016 Share Posted January 25, 2016 I'd go with any of the best poems by Hart Crane, DG Rossetti or Swinburne, purely because those poets (whose work is still everywhere on the Internet) are still so criminally overlooked. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyKC Posted January 25, 2016 Share Posted January 25, 2016 William Shakespeare has some wonderful Christian poems that don't depend on being transgressive, bawdy or crude. Highly recommend. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Writhen Posted January 25, 2016 Share Posted January 25, 2016 I have a copy of Paradise Lost that I've been meaning to get into. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Angalin Posted February 11, 2016 Share Posted February 11, 2016 If you can get a copy of The Dragon Book of Verse, it was originally a school poetry textbook (can you imagine?!) and is perfect for that age. Poems are divided into eight categories: mystery, landscape, sea, I forget the rest. Try to get the original which was first published in 1977, although the 2000 edition might be fine too; I just don't know it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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