Love That Dog is a novel published by Sharon Creech in 2001. Although categorized as a novel, it is not that type of fiction in the traditional sense. Each individual chapter is comprised of a poem written by a student named Jack in response to his teacher’s—Miss Stretchberry—writing prompts. None of the poems are especially long but as the story progresses the poems become a little bit longer and much more sophisticated. This maturation of the poetic talent of Jack coincides with an intensifying elevation of his self-confidence.
Creech was inspired to write the book by a poem titled “Love That Boy” by Walter Dean Myers. Myers becomes an important character in the story by virtue of excitement over his accepting an invitation written by Jack to come to his school and speak. Many of Jack’s poems are explicitly about the title dog. Several poems make an oblique reference to the animal that suggests Jack is dealing with the grief of his pet having been killed after having been run over by a blue car. Near the end of the book, the longest poem written by Jack makes it very clear that this is the case. Myers does not disappoint and shows up as promised, giving special attention to Jack and his poems.
This book succeeds quite well in achieving its goals. Among those goals are revealing the unrestricted limitations of poetry. The writing prompts that Miss Stretchberry assigns her students are not directly stated. One has to look at the context of Jack’s poems to figure out what those prompts might be. Just beneath this intention is one in which the book challenges young readers to get over their fear of what qualifies as poetry and look for it in different forms. Jack’s poetry literally starts out as nothing more than a typical student complaint framed within the recognizable form of a poem:
“I don’t want to / because boys / don’t write poetry. / Girls do.”
Those final two words succinctly encapsulate Jack’s constructed bias against poetry. He has been conditioned by the society around him to see poetry as the stuff of girls and boys who are sissies. The first challenge his teacher must face is that it is not just Jack but most of her students who have developed a negative preconception about the point and use of poetry. Over the course of the story, Jack learns that poems are not just the stuff of love and epic adventures. Poems can be a vehicle for expression of emotions. Not just emotions that one has trouble expressing in other ways but emotions that one may not even understand. By the time that Jack has come to know and appreciate the poetry of Myers he himself has reached the point where invitation to the poet to come speak in his class is not simply a letter written in prose. It is written as a poem. The most sophisticated and mature poetry Jack has produced to that point. Afterward, once Myers and has come and gone, he craft another poem as a thank-you letter.
The final goal that Miss Stretchberry attempts to convey to her students is perhaps the most important of them all. Jack’s development as a poet coincides with the grief he feels over the death of his dog. Jack is precisely the type of child who would likely have trouble expressing this grief in a positive way. Not just because of his age but also because of his sex and the general view that boys don’t cry. The book ultimately teaches Jack that he can cry but if for some reason he cannot or will not, he can turn to writing (and by association any artistic output) to do what may not be doable within a particular social milieu. Jack learns that it isn’t a reader that makes writing poetry worth the effort. Poetry is for the writer. It is a way for people like Jack to deal with trauma and a repressive environment in a way that can be done without anyone else knowing. Alternatively, of course, it can also be done with the whole world knowing, as Walter Dean Myers illustrates.
