American Poem - Essay Example

Leap in Mathew Dickman’s poems In poems the use of leap means the sudden change in a poem to seemingly unrelated imaginary material. A leap may involve a sudden change of the scenario from the initial implied location to another seemingly unrelated senario. Dickman’s poems inhabit much of America. In Dickman’s all American poems the leap into different states of America is pronounced. An example of a stanza from such a poem is ‘you can take the Chinatown bus from Boston, to the Chinatown in New York city’.

Here the poem leaps from Boston to New York. In Dickman’s poem Black ice from two poems by Mathew Dickman, ‘and all night the night was very much like a ship, though you will hate the way I say this, a ship..’. Here Dickman’s leaps from being in a person’s home with French doors to a ship ‘All night it felt like I was in your room, the French doors opened out onto the porch’. The emphasis for this poem is longing for a lover and Dickman uses the leap well to illustrate this. Further still in this poem there is ‘I keep waking up in a box made out of black ice, and sometimes theres your voice’ where the poem leaps from the author’s or narrator’s home into a ‘black ice’.

Mathew Dickman also uses leap in his poem snow, leap lines from this poem include ‘We can make snow angels with Rockefeller and most of Harvard Law. The white world Im talking about. The Kennedy brothers and snowball fights when all the roads leaving.’ Here the leap is from snow angels to Rockefeller and the to Harvard Law. Work CitedAll-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008)