performance poetry
Performance Poetry is poetry out loud; poems brought from the page to the stage.
A Crack in Space
In my college English class, we had to write an essay on an essay written by Wells Tower titled "Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?" It’s about people hunting elephants, and trying to come up with ways to justify killing them. In the end, the author concludes that he does not know what the right answer is, to kill or not to kill. Now let’s put aside the reasons they listed for killing them, like how they are destroying the environment by tearing down trees. At the end of the day, these hunters were killing for pleasure, not to make the world a better place. Here’s a quote from Wells Tower, “When an elephant keels over, its friends sometimes break their tusks trying to get it to stand up again. They bury their dead. They bear grudges against people who’ve hurt them, and sometimes go on revenge campaigns. They cry.” These graceful, humanlike animals are roaming the Earth, and there are people that brag about knowing where to put the bullet. But I’m not surprised. I mean, we kill humans, right? We kill our own kind. So of course we will kill something that reminds us of ourselves. The best of all, they take pictures with their trophies, smiling like they were just reunited with an old friend. How weird would it be if we went to funerals and took a selfie with the dead body in the casket? Now what about showing up to the funeral of the person we murdered and taking a picture with them in their casket? “Oh man, instagram is gonna get a kick out of this.”
By Sophia Maciel7 years ago in Poets