POETRY

"Love that dog / Like a bird loves to fly"

 

This story demonstrates that poetry is not just for girls; poetry is for everyone. Sharon Creech shares the story of Jack, who learns that poetry is a form of expression, and discovers it can help cope with the loosing someone we love, even loosing pets. The novel mimics a classroom reflective journal written in Jack's perspective. The novel explores a variety of types of poems and literary devices, including concrete poetry, onomatopeia, rhyme scemes, and meter.

 

Throughout the book Jack expresses his frustrations with reading and interpreting poetry, which reflects a typical grade school student's frustrations. However, through the process of exploring famous poets, like Jack Frost, Williams Carlos Williams, and Walter Dean Myers, Jack begins to find inspiration and develop a poetric voice of his own. Sharon Creech even provided a reference list of the poetry used in Miss Stretchberry's lessons, located in the back of the book.

 

Sharon Creech's book show readers how to read poetry and interpret it to find meaning on a personal level. Jack's voice often reflect a critical approach to the purpose of poetry. These excerpts can help students understand their own role as a reader of poetry. Class discussions can be modeled off of Jack's critical questions of famous poems to help students understand the meaning of poetry. The fact that the entire book is written in poetry proves that poetry, at a basic level, is just a creative means of self expression and telling a story. And students can model their own poems off of Jack's, who showed that anyone can write poetry.