60 pages • 2 hours read
Sharon CreechLove That Dog
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Middle Grade | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
What Makes a Poem
Jack resists his class’s poetry unit at the beginning of the school year as he doesn’t understand what makes a poem. Poems confuse him at first, as they do many students, due to their eccentricities in form, language, and topic. Jack also has a preconceived notion that only girls write poetry. Whatever excuses he makes, his hesitance really stems from feeling unqualified to make good art. After reading a short poem by Valerie Worth, Jack writes a response in verse that Miss Stretchberry wants to publish: “It’s not a poem. / Is it? / I guess you can / put it on the board / if you want to / but don’t put / my name / on it / in case / other people / think / it’s not a poem” (17). Jack can’t determine whether his own poem qualifies as poetry, but the more he reads and writes, the more confident he grows. Miss Stretchberry helps her students’ poems appear professional by typing them on nice paper and “publishing” them on a board, which helps Jack feel like his own work is worthy of an audience’s consideration: “I guess it does / look like a poem / when you see it / typed up / like that” (18). Jack’s poems look like they could sit beside Worth’s own in a book, which changes how he sees his potential.
Jack further explores what makes a poem when he questions works beyond his own. Students are often quicker to doubt themselves than professionals; they trust that professionals know what they’re doing, whereas students are amateurs. However, despite appreciating elements of Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” earlier in the story, Frost’s “The Pasture” leaves Jack baffled: “somebody’s going out / to the pasture / to clean the spring / [...] / and he wants YOU / (who is YOU?) / to come too. / I mean REALLY” (20). Though Jack’s attitude may appear ornery to adults, his is an important question about the nature of poetry. He wrestles with what makes words on a page poetic. Drawing on his own experience with classroom publication, Jack wonders if people assumed Frost’s poems were poems because they looked nice on a page. This analysis is simplistic, but Jack eventually learns that poetry is largely experiential. The beauty of sight, sound, and rhythm contributes to the impact poetry has on a reader, and once they understand this, they can go on to experiment with writing of their own.
As Jack reads more poems, he observes conventions that the poets employ to make their work unique. Jack finds this diversity inviting; he, too, can make short lines, small poems, and recognizable images. When studying concrete poems such as S. C. Rigg’s “The Apple,” he comments, “I never knew a poet person / could do that funny / kind of thing” (35). Jack loves that playful exercises, like creating images out of words, are considered forms of poetic expression. Once Jack learns to have fun creating poetry, he gets excited about honing his craft.
Voices Have Power
Jack’s voice becomes more powerful as he grows bolder. His early poems are short, stubborn, and obligatory, reflective of his guarded nature. His ideas and stories resonate with his teacher and classmates, but he must first find the courage to be vulnerable. Jack only wants his poems published anonymously as he doesn’t want to embarrass himself. His classmates’ positive reception does embarrass him, but it also encourages him. Upon receiving praise, he notices another anonymous poem on the board and asks Miss Stretchberry to reassure him or her “that [their] tree poem / is really / a poem / really really / and a good poem, too” (41). Jack wishes to uplift his classmates’ voices so that they, too, can participate in the economy of sharing work.
Jack grows more confident as the story progresses, but when Miss Stretchberry encourages him to write a letter to his new hero, he recoils. He insists, “I think Mr. Walter Dean Myers / would like to hear / from a teacher / who uses big words / and knows how / to spell / and / to type” (54). Jack is now comfortable sharing with his peers as they write at the same level, but he assumes a professional poet has stricter standards. Miss Stretchberry, by Jack’s reasoning, can appeal to Myers with higher quality writing. However, as Miss Stretchberry intuits, the opposite is true. Jack’s diction and syntax endear others not because he uses big words or eloquent phrases but because his language reflects his innocent nature. Jack endorses his school by telling Myers it’s “a clean place” (57) full of students and faculty who are “mostly nice” (57), and that Miss Stretchberry might “make brownies for you / because she sometimes / makes them for us” (58). Myers likely doesn’t receive many letters from awestruck children in contrast to professional—and likely boring—messages. Jack’s voice, in its simplicity and sincerity, holds power that not only fulfills his own dreams but also positively impacts his teacher and classmates.
Jack’s voice also establishes an endearing tone that readers can connect with. Jack’s writing choices showcase his character and create rapport between protagonist and reader. His voice invites readers and writers, especially beginners, to a personal journey by acknowledging that he, too, doesn’t understand poetry’s purpose or function. Readers don’t need to have poetry figured out because Jack doesn’t either, and he creates a safe space to explore these questions and experiment with new techniques.
The Purpose of Poetry
In addition to learning about what makes poetry, Jack develops a better understanding of why Miss Stretchberry leads a year-long poetry unit and, more so, why people read and write poetry to begin with. Jack learns that poetry explores humanity, invites readers to pay closer attention to the world and people’s experiences within it, and mirrors said experiences without being confined to prose conventions. Jack initially resists his teacher’s prompts, but as he becomes more comfortable with poetry’s unconventional rhythms (that is, unconventional when compared to prose), he realizes that poetry, on a basic level, is simpler than he first understood: “Maybe the wheelbarrow poet / was just / making a picture / with words” (22). Jack doesn’t become enamored with poetry merely because he realizes his capacity to write poems, but rather it provides a creative outlet to express and process past experiences.
Jack connects with some poems out of shared experiences. Jack likes the rhythm in Arnold Adoff’s “Street Music” even though the poet’s experience doesn’t quite align with his. Jack alters the poem to reflect his own street: “it has / quiet music / most of the time / whisp / meow / swish” (32). Jack also connects with Myers’s poem through shared experience, which becomes the primary reason he idolizes him. Jack adores “Love That Boy” because his father also calls him by saying, “Hey there, son!” (44); Jack used to call his dog over with “Hey there, Sky!” (45). He feels a kinship with Myers because the poet speaks to something meaningful in his own life.
Jack finds that poetry invites readers to pay closer attention to the world by introducing different perspectives. When Jack finally publishes a poem under his name, a classmates comments, “How’d you think of that, Jack?” (39). What may seem obvious to Jack is fresh and interesting to his peers because, through his poetry, he invites others to see the world through his eyes. Myers embodies this idea by both living and writing the worldly beauty he sees. When Myers visits, he enchants Jack with his “voice / low and deep and friendly and warm” and a laugh that “com[es] from way down deep / and bubbling up and / rolling and tumbling / out into the air” (83). As a poet, Myers doesn’t simply write; he lives heartily and shares his perspective of life’s beauty where most may only see the mundane.
Poems reflect human experience without being confined to prose conventions. Writers can adhere to grammatical rules in poetry, but the twisting and breaking of these rules are what push readers to see the world as they do. Jack appreciates his anonymous classmate’s tree poem because it looks “like a real tree / with straggly branches” (39). Jack is excited to recognize the poem’s image; its likeness reflects the poem’s subject in a different way than he’s seen before. Jack also implements literary devices such as repetition and line structure to give his poems a non-prosaic feel. Repetition in Jack’s work emphasizes and illustrates continuity. In “My Sky,” Jack describes Sky’s “wag-wag-wagging” and “slob-slob-slobbering” (68)—which both draws the reader’s attention to said details and establishes wagging and slobbering as continuous traits. Jack also uses short lines—often one-liners—to encourage pauses that reflect disjointed time and stresses words of significance. An example of this occurs after a blue car hits Sky: “it couldn’t even stop / and / Sky / was just there / in the road / lying on his side” (71). The rapid line breaks force readers to slow down and match the rhythm of Jack’s panic and confusion. At the end of the same poem, Jack implements one-liners for emphasis: “and / Sky / closed his eyes / and / he / never / opened / them / again / ever” (72). Jack processes the finality of death, the poem’s structure demonstrating how this moment marked a significant milestone in his life. Jack can freely express himself this way as poetry provides a space in which he can abandon convention and imbue emotion in the language and meter themselves.
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