Teresa Ritchie's Blog

Response to Love That Dog by Sharon Creech January 26, 2010

This is such a delightful story.  A little boy named Jack does not, under any circumstances, want to write a poem.  After all, “boys don’t write poetry, girls do.”  But his teacher brilliantly poses certain questions and prompts to get Jack talking about his favorite things.  At first, he talks about the reasons he does not like the poems his teacher reads in class.  Then we see a transformation come over him as he thinks about those poems, and he begins to offer his own insight as to the poems’ underlying meanings.  These bits of insight are inlaid in Jack’s own words about his daily life, and he incorporates into his own writing the ideas from the poems his teacher has read.  For example, when he describes speeding cars on his street – “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” – he alludes to Robert Frost’s poem Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.  Jack’s teacher frequently publishes his work, allowing him to gain confidence in writing.  He begins to see that writing poetry is not such a difficult thing to do – it’s even quite enjoyable.  I believe this story can be inspiring for even adults.  It was for me.  Creech gives the message that we don’t have to be brimming with elegant words in order to write poetry, but rather all we need to do is talk about those things that are meaningful to us.  In addition, if we take our writings and arrange them in different, creative ways, e.g., short lines (as Jack observes), as well as play around with the words (“wag-wag-wagging”), then they are magically transformed into poems.