The verse novel Love That Dog follows a young student, Jack, throughout his year in Miss Stretchberry’s class. Miss Stretchberry makes a point to introduce her students to poetry, reading them poems by American poets like William Carlos Williams and Valerie Worth. Jack begins the novel disinterested in poetry, particularly in writing it. However, with Miss Stretchberry’s tutelage and encouragement, Jack makes several important discoveries: first, poetry doesn’t have to be stuffy and boring. And second, poetry is accessible to anyone who wants to read it or write their own poems.
The novel takes the form of Jack’s poetry journal, and through his weekly entries, readers follow Jack on his journey of learning to love poetry. As Jack reads classic 20th-century poems, he humorously begins to pick apart what makes a poem a poem. “The Red Wheelbarrow,” a famously short poem, piques Jack’s interest in part because of its form: its lines are, at most, three words, and so Jack reasons that anything can be a poem if one uses short lines. It also intrigues him because it leaves so much unsaid. Jack’s willingness to ask questions about the poems—such as why the wheelbarrow matters so much, or why the speaker of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” stops to watch the snow when he has so much further to travel—is what brings the poems to life for him. Additionally, poems like Arnold Adoff’s “Street Music” and Valerie Worth’s collection Small Poems (which describe in verse common animals, like dogs and horses) show Jack that poems can be about everyday life. Jack explains in his journal, for instance, that her small poem about a dog perfectly captures how Jack’s dog, Sky, used to behave. And as Jack makes these discoveries, he gradually reveals Sky’s story through his own poems: how he and his dad adopted Sky, how much he loved Sky, and the heartbreaking story of a blue car hitting and killing Sky. Poetry, in this sense, not only gives Jack a vehicle through which to process his grief. He also comes to the conclusion that when one finds the right poet—in his case, Walter Dean Myers—poetry can bring joy to a person’s life, make them feel seen and heard, and show them a new way to look at their world.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Magic of Poetry ThemeTracker
The Magic of Poetry Quotes in Love That Dog
I don’t understand
the poem about
the red wheelbarrow
and the white chickens
and why so much
depends upon
them.
If that is a poem
about the red wheelbarrow
and the white chickens
then any words
can be a poem.
You’ve just got to
make
short
lines.
What do you mean—
Why does so much depend
upon
a blue car?
You didn’t say before
that I had to tell why.
The wheelbarrow guy
didn’t tell why.
I am sorry to say
I did not really understand
the tiger tiger burning bright poem
but at least it sounded good
in my ears.
and especially I liked the dog
in the dog poem
because that’s just how
my yellow dog
used to lie down,
with his tongue all limp
and his chin
between
his paws
and how he’d sometimes
chomp at a fly
and then sleep
in his loose skin,
just like that poet
Miss Valerie Worth
says,
in her small
dog poem.
I guess it does
look like a poem
when you see it
typed up
like that.
But I think maybe
it would look better
if there was more space
between the lines.
Like how I wrote it
the first time.
And maybe
that’s the same thing
that happened with
Mr. Robert Frost.
Maybe he was just
making pictures with words
about the snowy woods
and the pasture—
and his teacher
typed them up
and they looked like poems
so people thought
they were poems.
Like how you did
with the blue-car things
and reading-the-small-poems thing.
At both ends
of our street
are yellow signs
that say
Caution! Children at Play!
but sometimes
the cars
pay no attention
and speed down
the road
as if
they are in a BIG hurry
with many miles to go
before they sleep.
That was so great
those poems you showed us
where the words
make the shape
of the thing
that the poem
is about—
like the one about an apple
that was shaped like an apple
and the one about the house
that was shaped like a house.
My brain was pop-pop-popping
when I was looking at those poems.
I never knew a poet person
could do that funny
kind of thing.
I sure liked that poem
by Mr. Walter Dean Myers
called
“Love That Boy.”
Because of two reasons I liked it:
One is because
my dad calls me
in the morning
just like that.
He calls
Hey there, son!
And also because
when I had my
yellow dog
I loved that dog
and I would call him
like this—
I’d say—
Hey there, Sky!
(His name was Sky.)
Yes, you can type up
what I wrote about
my dog Sky
but don’t type up
that other secret one
I wrote—
the one all folded up
in the envelope
with tape on it.
That one uses too many of
Mr. Walter Dean Myers’s
words
and maybe
Mr. Walter Dean Myers
would get mad
about that.
And thank you
for typing up
my secret poem
the one that uses
so many of
Mr. Walter Dean Myers’s
words
and I like what
you put
at the top:
Inspired by Walter Dean Myers.
And I saw Sky
going after the ball
wag-wag-wagging
his tail
and I called him
“Sky! Sky!”
and he turned his
head
but it was too late
because the
blue car blue car
splattered with mud
hit Sky
thud thud thud
and kept on going
in such a hurry
so fast
so many miles to go
it couldn’t even stop
The bulletin board
looks like it’s
blooming words
with everybody’s poems
up there
on all those
colored sheets of paper
yellow blue pink red green.
And the bookcase
looks like it’s
sprouting books
all of them by
Mr. Walter Dean Myers
looking back at us
[...]
All of my blood
in my veins
was bubbling
and all of the thoughts
in my head
were buzzing
and
I wanted to keep
Mr. Walter Dean Myers
at our school
forever.
