Saturday, February 13th, 7pm

Award-winning essayist PHILIP LOPATE and award-winning poet SANDY MCINTOSH will speak about and sign their new poetry collections, Lopate's At the End of the Day: Selected Poems and an Introductory Essay and McInstosh's Ernesta, In the Style of Flamenco.

Philip Lopate

“Though I am known today mostly as an essayist, occasionally as a fiction writer, for about fifteen years I wrote poetry. I published poems in countless little magazines, gave readings all over, earned a living of sorts as a poet in the schools…and put out two collections: the first in 1972, the second in 1976. When I look back at those years during which poetry formed such an important part of my identity, I am tempted to rub my eyes, as though recalling a time when I ran off and joined the circus; yet at the time it seemed a logical enough pursuit.” —from Introductory Essay

 

 

Sandy McIntosh

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?

 

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