44 pages • 1 hour read
Sharon CreechHate That Cat
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 62-97Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 62-97 Summary
This section covers poems and notes from January 10 through March 21. Jack, again, tells Miss Stretchberry he is “Brain broken” because he cannot come up with a simile. He does, however, go on to create examples of metaphor, hyperbole, and alliteration in the same message. He finally does compose a simile in which he compares a stuffed chair to a “pleasingly plump” mother. Miss Stretchberry responds, evidently asking Jack to “Go on” and explain why the chair is like such a mother. He writes that it sits quietly and waits for him but seems lonely because it has no dog to sit in its lap anymore when Jack is not there.
A week or so later, Jack says that he has finally “dug up a metaphor,” and it is about his new kitten; he’s named her Skitter McKitter because this describes how she moves and the sound her claws make (68). He writes a poem called “THE BLACK KITTEN” in which he calls his kitten a poet because she leaps among various surfaces like a poet leaps from line to line, sometimes fast and sometimes slow in a “silent steady rhythm” (70). He asks Miss Stretchberry not to put this poem on the board, however, because he thinks he hasn’t found the right words to express this feeling. He writes that a good poet can “paint,” using words, things that a person might feel but cannot verbalize; this is similar to the understanding his mother gains when she puts her hands on Jack to feel his laughter. Yesterday, he writes, she put her hands on Skitter to feel her purr, and Jack says he cannot explain why Skitter is a poet just as he cannot explain purr. His mother can sign the word, laugh, but cannot hear a laugh. Jack struggles with his inability to explain what happens in his mother’s head when the two of them “paint words” with one another. He can hear the words in his head as his hands sign them, but he does not know what or if she hears in her own head. Again, he returns to Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” suggesting that a great deal depends on the hands that make words without sound as they wave in the air.
Jack likes Miss Stretchberry’s suggestion that he try turning his metaphor inside out, comparing a mother to a chair rather than a chair to a mother. He notes, though, that this changes the meaning of the comparison because, while a chair can be like a plump mother, his own mother is a lot more than a chair, and she isn’t plump. He tries it anyway, writing about her arms that hold him, her sturdy legs, and her straight back. After the poem, Jack explains that his mother can’t just sit and wait for him because she works at night and is always moving. He feels that she’s not really like a chair at all and concludes that he can never be “a / real / poet” because he cannot make the metaphor work for him (82). He worries about Williams, if the poet is still alive, and why Williams wrote two poems about plums. Jack thinks it would be impossible to convince Uncle Bill that these are actually poems and not just scribbled notes on paper scraps.
Nearly a week later, Jack reports finding a poem about a cat by Williams, the title of which is “POEM.” He decides that Williams must be a little lazy because he doesn’t try to come up with a better title, and, further, the poem simply describes a cat climbing into a flowerpot. When Jack reads the poem, it conjures up a picture of Skitter in his head, so he writes a poem called “Non-Poem” about her. He claims that if Williams doesn’t have to come up with a better title, then neither should he. He composes “Another Non-Poem” about the mean black cat in the tree at the bus stop. A week later, Jack confirms that Uncle Bill thinks Williams is an overrated “minor poet.” Jack sticks up for Williams and the small things Williams writes about that people don’t normally notice, but Uncle Bill wants poetry to be about “LARGE moments” like death and war.
Pages 62-97 Analysis
This section highlights The Link Between Creativity and Artistic Freedom. Jack feels paralyzed when tasked with creating a figure of speech in his work, without allowing it to come from his feelings more organically. He feels that his brain is “broken” when he can’t think of a simile; however, his very description of his struggle with writing includes metaphor, hyperbole, and alliteration. His description of his “bouncing black kitten” compares Skitter to a ball (62), and his description of his brain as “broken” is an overstatement that emphasizes the truth of how he feels. When Miss Stretchberry encourages him to simply try flipping his comparisons around—an instruction that suggests playfulness and inventiveness rather than the minding of rules—he “like[s]” it, and he is able to stretch himself, verbally and emotionally, in ways that feel more significant.
Jack also notices that famous poets often disregard so-called poetic “rules,” which inspires him to write freely and creatively. For instance, Jack notices that William Carlos Williams simply titles one of his poems “POEM,” breaking “rules” about giving each poem a unique, memorable name. Because of this, Jack, too, writes a poem that he titles just “Non-Poem,” saying that “if Mr. WCW doesn’t have to think of a title, I don’t either, right?” (92). He appreciates how Williams is unconcerned by the so-called rules of “real writing” by naming a poem “POEM” and writing about topics that Uncle Bill deems “nonpoetic,” like plums. Seeing how Williams writes without concern for the apparent “rules” of poetry, Jack jokingly calls him “kookoo” and teases Miss Stretchberry by pointing out how Williams “does NOT use much in the way of” the various poetic devices she teaches or that Uncle Bill demands (86). Jack identifies with Williams’s choice to choose artistic freedom over rules, and he even stands up to his Uncle Bill, defending Williams’s choice to write about
the small ordinary things
……………………………
and the small ordinary moments
that you don’t notice
until you read his poems (95).
Jack’s willingness to defend Williams against Uncle Bill and the professor’s pedantic ideas about “real writing” results from Jack’s own discovery of the connection between creativity and artistic freedom.
As Jack unleashes his creativity through his writing, he also discovers The Emotional Power of Poetry. He realizes that a poem doesn’t have to be factually true in order to contain emotional truth. For instance, when he writes about his mother, he initially wonders about writing down ideas and comparisons that aren’t strictly true; when he compares his mother to a comfortable chair, he worries about this because, in real life, she doesn’t sit still like a chair. This friction between “truth” and his writing makes him doubt his ability as a writer. However, his simile emphasizes poetry’s emotional power since the warmth and comfort his mother gives him leads him to think of her as a chair. Further, Jack’s worries about the aptness of his similes prove his desire to write from a place of authenticity.
In this way, Jack continues to work through his self-doubt toward self-empowerment. When he feels he hasn’t captured the way in which Skitter is like a poet, he says it’s something he can feel though he “can’t get it into words” (71). He thinks a “good poet” paints with words “things that you can feel / but don’t know how to say” (71). While he worries that he will not become “a / real / poet” because he wonders whether he has this ability, he goes on to describe how his mother “paints / words” with her hands and how they paint words together this way (82), linking his writing to her signing, and presenting both as examples of The Artistry of Communication. Moreover, despite his earlier claim that it would be “IM-POSS-I-BLE” to write about his mother, he does so quite often now. He says that “so much depends upon” those hands that wave in the air (75), making words: This is how his mother speaks, and this is how they interact and communicate with each other. Their relationship, as well as her relationship with the world, depends upon her hands. Since communication connects people, Jack sees it as artistic and special.
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