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Odds and Ends

Dancing for charity

Some University students had the chance to help charity and dance the night away at the Winter Ball Saturday.

With about 800 attendees, the events' organizers proclaimed the dance a success.

"We were definitely pleased," Alpha Phi Alpha Chapter Secretary Kazz Pinkard said.

Chapter Vice President Michael McPheeters agreed.

"It sold out," McPheeters said. "It was a good chance for people to get together and take a break from academia."

The Winter Ball is an annual event that has become one of the largest events in the African-American community at the University, Pinkard said.

This year the Ball was organized by Alpha Phi Alpha, a service fraternity, in conjunction with Black Caesars Entertainment and 320 Entertainment.

All of the fraternity's proceeds go to various national and local charities, McPheeters said.

One of the charities to which Alpha Phi Alpha donates is the Alpha Angel Network, which gives seven scholarships to high school students in the Charlottesville and Albemarle County area every year.

According to McPheeters, the fraternity plans to take exclusive control of the Ball's organization. He said he hopes next year's Winter Ball will be even better.

"We expect bigger and better things for Winter Ball 2001," he added.

Powerful poetry presentations

Members of the University community will have an opportunity to acquaint themselves with lyric poetry at an upcoming symposium sponsored by the English department.

Helen Vendler, a professor from Harvard University, will present a lecture about the lyric poem "L'Allegro," by John Milton Feb. 10, in Newcomb Hall at 3:30 p.m.

"Helen Vendler, who is one of our most celebrated and precise readers anywhere, will focus her talk on the earliest major lyric by John Milton," English Prof. Chip Tucker said.

According to Tucker, Vendler is an important commentator in the poetry world.

"She has done indispensable work on poets as different as Shakespeare and Yates, Keats and Wallace Stevens," he said. "Her reviews are highly regarded."

The second part of the symposium, scheduled for Feb. 11 in Minor Auditorium at 1:30 p.m., will feature Vendler as well as presentations by three other poetry commentators. The three other presenters are Prof. Garrett Stewart of the University of Iowa, Prof. Bonnie Costello of Boston University and Prof. Nicholas Jenkins of Stanford University.

Each presenter will give a half-hour speech followed by a general discussion, Tucker said.

"We mean to run an event that will encourage and reward audience participation," he said.

Organizers said they designed the event, which is free and open to the public, to raise awareness of an art form that has become neglected.

"We here on the Speaker's Committee of the English Department believe a return to the consideration of lyric poetry could give literary studies a shot in the arm," Tucker said. "The close grappling with language that lyric poetry demands can revive habits of precise attention, at a time when much in contemporary culture has been conspiring to diffuse it."

Compiled by Andrew Merson

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