Love That Dog

Jack gives Miss Stretchberry permission to display his poems, but he doesn’t want his name displayed. He concedes that they look nice when she types and prints them out.

Miss Stretchberry asks Jack to write about a pet, but he resists, saying he doesn’t have one. He had one once—a yellow dog—but refuses to write about him.

Jack comes to enjoy short poems with vivid imagery, particularly “dog” by Valerie Worth. Miss Stretchberry wants to display more of Jack’s poems, especially his own dog poem, but Jack insists on remaining anonymous as he doesn’t believe his writing is actually poetry. Jack likes the way his work looks posted but has a few suggestions: He wants more space between the lines, and though he likes the picture of the yellow dog next to his poem, it doesn’t look like his own yellow dog.

Jack reads another Frost poem called “The Pasture,” but he struggles to connect with it as much as Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”