RELEASED: Oct. 21, 2004

DANVILLE, KY—The Centre English program will sponsor a free public lecture by Elizabeth Sagaser, associate professor of English at Colby College, on Oct. 26 at 7 p.m. in Centre's Norton Center for the Arts boardroom.

Sagaser's lecture, "Holding and Solitude: Addressing the Absent Beloved in the Lyric," will concentrate on selected sonnets by Shakespeare as well as lyrics by Shelley, Emily Dickinson and modern New York City poet Frank O'Hara.

Professor Sagaser is a specialist in 16th- and 17th-century English literature. In addition to her many scholarly articles, she's a widely published poet. Recently, Sagaser contributed an essay titled Flirting with Eternity: Teaching Form and Meter in a Renaissance Poetry Course to a collection of essays titled Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, edited by Centre professor Mark Rasmussen.

Rasmussen, associate professor of English, comments, "I've long been a great admirer of Elizabeth Sagaser's work. A poet herself, she's a passionate and brilliant interpreter of poetry, both in her superb critical essays and in her work as a gifted and charismatic teacher. I particularly hope that poetry-lovers in the area will come hear what she has to say."

The underlying concern of much of Sagaser's scholarship, teaching and poetry is how people have used, and do use, poetry to cope with their knowledge of human fragility.

During her visit, Sagaser will be holding a workshop on poetic meter in early English poetry with the Centre students in the British Literature survey course.

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