Sandy McIntosh introduces "Ernesta: In the Style of the Flamenco" to the Fourth Friday Studio Series. Filmed by Mark Staudinger at the Long Island Violin Shop, February 25th, 2011.

Ernesta does what she has to do...

In Ernesta, Sandy McIntosh’s exuberant imagination breathes fresh excitement into narrative poetry. The title poem, spotlighting a 19th century Spanish pianist who does whatever it takes (such as eliminating the competition) to survive, discloses fascinating social dimensions of music and its impact: “Music will watch us drown.” “Among the Disappointments of Love” are shorter poems that show how dubious ideals of love get punctured, unbridled egos cause romantic relationships to crash, friendship is subject to a disorienting mirror, a victim of the male gaze becomes the gazer, and science colonizes the hapless body. “Nathan, in the Ancient Language” features a narrative about an affluent dunderhead who comically fails at every endeavor yet cannot shake the comfortable fate ordained for him by his family’s privilege. Replete with echoes of Anglo-Saxon music and phrasing and some actual quotations from the old tongue, the poem raises issues about the ownership of language, charismatic charlatanism and its undoing, and the (in)ability to read other people and the material consequences of reading poorly. Further, the poem implicitly asks: How should individuals utilize the power that sometimes randomly comes their way?

Patricia Carlin in The Best American Poetry on 237 More Reasons To Have Sex:

I like the poem’s inventiveness, its brio and its spirit of play, all of which depend to some extent on its extravagant length. Taking off from the absurd pedantic epigraph, the poem rolls on, generating itself from line to line and seeming as inexhaustible as its subject. I also like the way the poem moves, shifting nimbly as it embraces a grab bag of material including little film scenarios (invented and borrowed), miniature scripts for porn films and sex fantasies, word play, jokes, double entendres, tiny domestic scenes, and much much more. As also fits the subject, the poem is having a very good time.