It was a crisp, 12-degree night but a warm audience of about 200 that came to hear Charity Randall Award winner Karen Kovacik, and a former winner, Linda Pastan, read for the International Poetry Forum.

Forum director Samuel Hazo presented Kovacik with the Randall Award, named for a Pittsburgher and editor who died young in an auto accident.

Author of "Nixon and I," "Beyond the Velvet Curtain" and "Metropolis Burning," Kovacik dipped into each for those assembled Wednesday at Carnegie Library Lecture Hall. In "The Story of My Life, as Written by My Mother," the narrator says, "I should have seen the signs. I know: the eighth-grade girls despising her for using works like 'ingenue' and 'corpulent.' " The mother concludes with her fear: "she hasn't written anything too mean about us. Yet."

After hearing about big Buddhas blown up in Afghanistan in 2001, Kovacik wrote "Requiem for the Buddhas of Bamiyan." "For fourteen centuries you stood fast ... survived Genghis Khan's cannon ... you whom the Taliban ringed with burning tires, blackening your face, you with dynamite in your groin." The audience, selective with applause, clapped for this one.

Kovacik developed "a little Nixon fascination a few years ago" and read one of the resulting poems: "Nixon on the Pleasures of Undressing a Woman." The fictive president comments, "with a woman you can never be certain how deep the layers go." And he admits, "Some mornings I linger in Pat's closet, among all the incompatible species of fox and alligator, ostrich and lamb."

Linda Pastan, a leading lady of American poetry and author of 11 books of poems, reads as well as she writes. She always seems to be reading a favorite, which quickly becomes a listener's favorite.

She started with "Weather Forecast": "Somewhere it is about to snow, if not in the northern suburbs, then in the west, if not there, then here."

From "The Last Uncle," she read "Tears": "When the ophthalmologist told me gravely that I didn't produce enough tears, I wanted to say: but I cry too much and too often. At airports and weddings and sunsets. At movies." His prescription of artificial tears -- "this bottle of distilled grief" -- gets tucked away for poems that need to be "watered."

The audience chuckled at "In the Garden," about training a dog. The pooch gets rewarded just for "looking at me with trust and adoration" -- even though he hasn't obeyed the "lie down" command. She moves to "This is the beginning of love and disobedience. I was never meant to be a God."

Her "Prosody 101" is a beautiful, funny, metaphorical definition of poetry that has nothing to do with "strict iambic line goose-stepping."

She read "The Photographer" from her newest book, "Queen of a Rainy Country." It grew out of what she called "one of the most romantic experiences of my life." That amounted to a photographer following her along the street in New York, encouraging her with "Lovely. Lovely. Turn your head a little. Lick your lips." She reads, "It wasn't my soul he captured in his intricate box but his idea of the poet as beautiful woman."

Each poet closed with a "signature" poem. Kovacik chose "Songs From a Belgrade Baker," based on a 1999 New York Times photo of a candlelit bakery following a bombing. The poem ends with a powerful listing from "Blessed are the Slovenes, for they are the cake-makers" to "Blessed are the Albanians for their love of cinnamon.".....

Pastan treated the audience to "Something About the Trees," a form that repeats lines as the poem progresses and grows richer with each repetition. You had to be there for this one.

First Published: March 9, 2007, 5:00 a.m.