A toasty room on a wintry-cold February evening…

The spring, 2010 "Poems & Pints" series, co-hosted at The Fraunces Tavern, New York's oldest, by the Poetry Society of America, the nation's oldest poetry organization, and the dynamic Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, launched last night with a reading by Terese Svoboda and Molly Peacock.

Both poets are prolific in other genres.

Terese has written over a hundred published short stories, six novels, and a prizewinning memoir, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent as well as five collections of poetry. She was also the producer of the stunning PBS series on American poets, Voices & Visions, and her poetry videos and documentaries have aired on PBS internationally and been screened at the Museum of Modern Art. Terese read mostly from her new book, Weapons Grade. The poet Caroline Knox has praised her "grave view of America today" but rejoices because "she makes poems that laugh anyway!"

Molly is the author of How to Read a Poem…and start a Poetry Circle as well as a memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece and a one-woman show about her life as a poet, The Shimmering Verge. She's edited a collection of essays, The Private I: Privacy in a Public World, and has one of her own in the 2007 volume, Best American Essays, and she's written six collections of poems, including Cornucopia, New and Selected Poems, and The Second Blush, just out in paperback.

Molly read a love poem entitled "Pink Paperclip"("the color of a girl's barrette"). Swivelling around afterwards to say hello to her husband, the Joyce scholar Michael Grodin, I noticed the same (instantly talismanic) holding his tie in place.

The photos below are by Lawrence Schwartzwald.