Dreaming America

Aufgabe: Describe the process of American civilization and the reactions to it as presented in the poem.
Analyse the speaker`s attitude to this process of civilization.
Focus on the poem`s structure, language and stylistic devices.

Leider habe ich keine Ahnung von Gedichten und kann dem entsprechend nichts mit diesen Aufgaben anfangen...
Es wäre super, wenn ihr Tipps oder Links zu diesem Gedicht hättet - würde mir echt helfen ^^
Google ist hier nämlich garnicht hilfreich gewesen...
Danke schonmal im Voraus =)


Joyce Carol Oates: Dreaming America (1975)
When the two-lane highway was widened
the animals retreated.
Skunks, raccoons, rabbits - even their small corpses
disappeared from the road- transformed into rags
then into designs
then into stains
then nothing.
When the highway was linked to another
then to another
six lanes then nine then twelve rose
sweeping to the horizon
along measured white lines.
The polled Herefords were sold.
When the cornfields were bulldozed
the farmhouses at their edges turned into shanties;
the outbuildings fell.
When the fields were paved over
Frisch`s Big Boy rose seventy-five feet in the air.
The Sunoco and Texaco and Gulf signs competed
on hundred-foot stilts
like eyeballs on stalks
white optic-nerves
miraculous.
Illuminated at night.
Where the useless stretch of trees lay
an orange sphere like a golf ball
announces the Shopping Mall, open
for Thursday evening shopping.
There, tonight, droves of teenagers hunt
one another, alert on the memorized pavement.
Where did the country go? - cry the travelers, soaring
past. Where did the country go? - ask the strangers.
The teenager never ask.
Where horses grazed in a dream that had no history,
tonight a thirteen-year-old girl stands dreaming
into the window of Levitz`s Record Shop.
We drive past, in a hurry. We disappear.
We return.