RELEASED: April 1, 2004

DANVILLE, KY—John Hollander, noted poet and critic, will give this year's Bastian Lecture at Centre College. The free lecture, "Poetry and the Art of Finding," is April 8 at 7 p.m. in the Norton Center for the Arts board room.

Hollander's talk will focus on the villanelle, a poetic form that was invented in the

16th century and is still used by many poets today.

Hollander, who is also a teacher and editor, has been a presence in the American literary community for several decades. He is known for his mastery of verse structure as well as for the charm, nuance and wit of his poetry.

Lisa Williams, poet and assistant professor of English at Centre, says, "John Hollander is one of our great critics of lyric poetry. More than any other contemporary critic I can think of, he is grounded in the tradition of poetry not only in English but in classical and European languages. He also approaches poetry with an attention to craft and creativity rather than with a merely critical or literary point of view. He is also an endlessly inventive poet in his own right, which vitalizes his own criticism with special knowledge of the craft."

Hollander has written numerous volumes of poetry, including Picture Window, The Figurehead, Tesserae, Selected Poetry, Harp Lake, Powers of Thirteen, Spectral Emanations, Types of Shape, and A Crackling of Thorns, which was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

Hollander's books of criticism include: The Work of Poetry, Melodious Guile, The Figure of Echo, Rhyme's Reason, Vision and Resonance, Images of Voice, and The Untuning of the Sky. Hollander has collaborated on operatic and lyric works with such composers as Milton Babbitt, George Perle and Hugo Weisgall.

His many honors include the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Levinson Prize and the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize from the Modern Language Association of America, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, he is currently the Sterling Professor of English Emeritus at Yale.

The Bastian Lecture Series is named after Carol Bastian, Jobson Professor Emerita of English at Centre. Each spring a prominent scholar in English or American literary studies is invited to present a public lecture on campus.

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