Cold rain pattered outside on the window panes while Molly Peacock spoke at length about love and her poetry in the warmth of the Wren Room in Sanborn Library yesterday afternoon.
Dressed in a somber black outfit considerably brightened by a giant blue dragonfly pin on her jacket lapel, the bespectacled, honey-colored bobbed Peacock read her poetry to a seated audience of about 40 students, faculty, and local writers.
Peacock was introduced by her friend Cleopatra Mathis, an English and creative writing professor at the College, who said she delighted in Peacock's willingness to tackle virtually any topic from sex to religion.
"Everything's fair game," Mathis said.
She read one of her favorite Peacock sonnets, "Anger Sweetened" in which the speaker likens disguised emotion to a "caramel-colored grasshopper."
Peacock explained that she is very taken with imagery and described a couple of her poems as "physical."
Mathis praised Peacock's "courageous and surprising" use of structure and rhyme scheme, as well as subject.
Peacock said she liked starting a poem "with a clearly bounded structure" because "the promise of the form is very beautiful" for her.
But Peacock joked, "I'm not a perfectionist" so many of her sonnet lines often run very long, which would lead to "fat sonnets."
Mathis warned that Peacock's poetry may not be to everyone's liking. "They hit the nerve," she said.
"She has a very strong voice that rises above the deadly hum of contemporary poetry."
Peacock's originality in her poetry has been recognized and rewarded on numerous occasions. Her work has been published in publications such as The Paris Review, The New Yorker and The New Republic.
She has also been the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Fellowships from the Ingram Merril Foundation and two from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Peacock has also found time to do a great deal of teaching. Having attended the State University of New York at Binghamton and Johns Hopkins University, she has taught at Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University and Bucknell University.
Peacock said she did not seriously start writing until college. During her sophomore year in college she said she "became more interested in calling myself a poet but I felt I had to earn my stripes."
Peacock felt she had to write about her past and found that poetry "provided boundaries, a frame" that also allowed her "to make art."
With thespianic gusto, Peacock first read the whimsical "Why I Am Not a Buddhist." With fingers wagging and arms outstretched, Peacock teased the audience with a challenge -- "Judge for yourselves whether I'm really a Buddhist."
Most of the reading selections such as "Why," were taken from Peacock's two more recent poem collections, Original Love and Take Heart.
"Both books are about love in one way or another," Peacock said.
"For me, coming to Dartmouth is all about love. The greatest love affair of my life was conducted partly on this campus," Peacock confided to the audience with a beaming smile.
The theme of love is especially evident in "The Wheel," a double sonnet in which a lovelorn teenaged girl lusts after a schoolmate.
After rhapsodizing about her love interest's nose and "the moles on his arms and legs," the teen says, "I made my play at the Junior Carnival."
Peacock also broke with convention and said that many poets deny that they are the subjects of their poems. But, Peacock laughed, "I won't say that to you."
In "Say You Love Me," a "very loose" terzarima, Peacock relates a conversation she once had as a 15-year old with her drunken father.
When Peacock finally relents to her father's demands and tells him, "I love you," he orders, "Say you love me, Dad!"
"I have one of those lives that got better and better," Peacock said smiling afterwards.
Peacock explored a "phenomena probably we all have in common" in "The Return."
"When you are having sex, you are thinking," Peacock said, evoking laughter from the audience. "Things occur to you during the lulls."
Peacock also read "The Shoulders of a Woman," "The Fare," "Goodbye, Hello in the East Village" and "The Little Miracle."
