Hate That Cat

In Love That Dog, which is the prequel to Hate That Cat, Jack’s teacher, Miss Stretchberry, introduces him to poetry. At first, he asks her not to share his poems with the class. Jack’s tone in his poems is recalcitrant, even resentful at times, especially when Miss Stretchberry asks him to explain his ideas. When she shares William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” with the class, Jack responds with his own similar poem, claiming that a great deal depends on a blue car that is “splattered with mud / speeding down the road” (Creech, Sharon. Love That Dog, HarperCollins, p. 10). When Miss Stretchberry asks him to explain why so much depends upon that car, Jack doesn’t want to write about it or explain its importance. However, he repeatedly brings up the blue car in subsequent poems, eventually giving Miss Stretchberry permission to share his work anonymously with the class. Though Jack resists her instruction to write about a pet, insisting that he doesn’t have one, he reveals that he did have a yellow dog named Sky. He lets Miss Stretchberry share his poem about choosing Sky at the animal shelter, even suggesting a title and paper color, which indicates his growing appreciation of poetry and how he can use it as an authentic form of self-expression.