- May 13, 2024
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John Sbordone has been busy. After he split with the Flagler Playhouse this year, he started a new theater company, and now he’s throwing a poetry shindig the likes of which Palm Coast has rarely seen.
The Poetry Clash will be 7:30-9 p.m. Saturday, July 23, at the Hollingsworth Gallery, on the balcony at City Marketplace.
The poetry event is designed to raise funds for and promote the new theater company, called the City Repertory Theatre, or as Sbordone usually calls it, CRT. The production schedule begins Sept.15 with “The Laramie Project.” (The $10 admission to the July 23 Poetry Clash covers a glass of wine and finger foods, as well.)
“Our mission for CRT is to provide thought-provoking and meaningful drama and discussion for our audiences,” Sbordone said via email. “We think there is a need for alternative theater focusing on the ‘art of the actor.’ What better place to make that art than in an art gallery, and what better venue then J.J. Graham’s thought-provoking Hollingsworth Gallery?”
Sbordone’s Poetry Clash will combine traditional poetry and the spoken word, reflection and rage, the tender and the tough.
“Poetry is the art of the word,” he said. “The poet, like the painter, manipulates his medium to investigate or explain or merely represent his world. For me it is a natural decision to include poetry in our concept of theater.”
Nina Link and Onicas Gaddis are the spoken word performers. Sbordone asked me to read from my book, “Winter Walking Home” (and some new poems), to provide the traditional poetry. Joining me will be Jane Redemann Sage, author of “Rise Above.”
I’m excited about this opportunity, not just because it will be fun to read for an audience and give my poems a chance to walk around the room and mingle with living people for a while, but also because poetry is healthy. A mentor of mine once said the world would be a better place if everyone started the day by reading a poem.
For me, poetry is a way to combat the fast-paced whirl of text messages (reply within seconds or risk insulting your textee), email (check it frequently or you’ll need a life boat to survive the flood) and channel surfing (do you really want to watch that infomercial, or are you just so tired of texting and emailing that you don’t have the energy for anything else?).
Sometimes, in that current that we live and love in, a moment passes by that we know is significant — a moment that we wish we could keep just for its intensity. It might be a compliment or a curse or a communion with God or nature or a neighbor or a son or a daughter. Poems are like bottles for capturing those moments.
That makes them invaluable as a personal history to the one who first experienced that communion, but poems can be more than that.
If we can experience, through a poem, someone else’s communion, we now have access to something much bigger — now, we are a community, a collection of communions that we share and toss back and forth or unveil in quiet corners.
If you think this is all bunk, you probably stopped reading a long time ago, and you’re on to Cops Corner. But if you’ve got a bit of the romantic in you, and you haven’t listened to any poetry read aloud in a while, come on over. We’ll have a clash.
IF YOU GO
The Poetry Clash will be 7:30-9 p.m. Saturday, July 23, at the Hollingsworth Gallery, on the balcony at City Marketplace. The $10 admission covers a glass of wine and finger foods and also benefits the new City Repertory Theatre.
