{"id":27,"date":"2013-09-24T18:34:42","date_gmt":"2013-09-24T18:34:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/?page_id=27"},"modified":"2013-09-27T20:30:44","modified_gmt":"2013-09-27T20:30:44","slug":"contemporary","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/?page_id=27","title":{"rendered":"Biography and Published Works"},"content":{"rendered":"

Published Works
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Ronald Wallace\u2019s first published books were works of scholarship, though he is perhaps now better known for his poetry.\u00a0 His first scholarly book, Henry James and the Comic Form<\/i>, published by the University of Michigan Press in 1975, argues that James\u2019s novels should be read in the context of an American comic tradition, and was hailed by Leon Edel (James’s most distinguished biographer) as\u00a0 “a turning point in James criticism.” His second scholarly book, The Last Laugh:\u00a0 Form and Affirmation in the Contemporary American Comic Novel<\/i>, published by the University of Missouri Press in 1979, continued his exploration of humor in American literature, examining comedy in novels by John Barth, John Hawkes, Vladimir Nabokov, Ken Kesey, Robert Coover,\u00a0 and others, and was praised by Norris Yates as a “model of scholarly and critical style” that\u00a0 provides “reinterpretations–both brilliantly and solidly.”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 His third scholarly book, God Be With the Clown:\u00a0 Humor in American Poetry<\/i>,\u00a0 explores the\u00a0 comic poems of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost,\u00a0 Wallace Stevens,\u00a0 John Berryman, and a number of more recent poets, establishing him as an authority in the field.\u00a0 American Literature<\/i> commented that “he argues with persuasiveness and wit for a deeper appreciation of the comic\u00a0 perspective as a shaping force in determining the nature of America’s poetic achievement.”<\/p>\n

The continuing importance of Wallace’s scholarly work on humor in American literature is\u00a0 evidenced by Harold Bloom’s inclusion of a chapter from Henry James and the Comic Form<\/i> in\u00a0 Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations:\u00a0 Henry James’s “The Ambassadors”<\/i>, and by Gale Research’s\u00a0 excerpting of\u00a0 sections of several chapters of Wallace’s The Last Laugh<\/i> in their annual volumes.\u00a0\u00a0 The Wallace Stevens Journal<\/i> reprinted, in a special issue, his chapter on Stevens from God Be With the Clown<\/i>.<\/p>\n

In 1989 Wallace published his anthology, Vital Signs: Contemporary American Poetry from the University Presses<\/i>, a comprehensive text that, in the words of The Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook<\/i>, “reads like a Who’s Who of the contemporary scene.”\u00a0 Establishing Wallace as an authority on University Press\u00a0 poetry publishing, the anthology was praised widely for its “considerable bibliographical and\u00a0 historical value.”\u00a0 Jonathan Holden, in The Associated Writing Programs Chronicle<\/i>, is\u00a0 typical of other reviewers in noting “its almost devastating thoroughness” and concluding,\u00a0 “it will, in my opinion, remain an indispensable source-book for the foreseeable future.\u00a0 Like The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics<\/i>, this book will be an essential addition to the library of any contemporary American poet.”<\/p>\n

Wallace’s eight full-length poetry books and six chapbooks have shown the development of his work on a technical, intellectual,\u00a0 and emotional level. His first book, Plums, Stones, Kisses & Hooks<\/i>, published in 1981 in the\u00a0 University of Missouri Press’s Breakthrough Books Series, reveals his mastery of the lyric mode\u00a0 in poems that befriend the reader with their accessibility, wit, observational powers, and charm, and\u00a0 introduce some of his major themes: mortality (with special reference to his father’s long illness and death),\u00a0 the natural world, the importance of family life and community, the vagaries of love and time.\u00a0\u00a0 Although the poems are written in free verse, their control of language and rhythm and line prefigure\u00a0 his later explorations of contemporary uses of traditional forms.<\/p>\n

About Plums, Stones, Kisses, & Hooks<\/i>, The St. Louis Post Dispatch<\/em> commented: “The writer\u00a0 consolidates his knowledge, steadily examining the small and large particulars, slowly accumulating\u00a0 wisdom and character.\u00a0 The results are real and lovely. . . .\u00a0 Wallace’s fine book preserves the\u00a0 texture, the beauty, and the definition of ordinary life.”\u00a0 Poet Richard Hugo predicts, “Given the\u00a0 honest artistry of his hard won poems, it would be impossible that his reputation won’t increase\u00a0 considerably in the years to come.\u00a0 His poems ring with validity.”<\/p>\n

In Tunes for Bears to Dance To<\/i>, Wallace extends his range, moving to a more conversational idiom and an occasionally more humorous tone.\u00a0 The poems become longer, more narrative, and rely as much on witty self-deprecation and self-exposure as on the song-like lyricism of his earlier\u00a0 work.\u00a0 While relinquishing none of its suppleness, his line becomes tougher and perhaps jauntier.\u00a0\u00a0 Several poems in traditional forms indicate a direction his later work would take.<\/p>\n

About Tunes for Bears to Dance To<\/i>, Henry Taylor wrote in The Washington Times, “Wallace’s\u00a0 control of metrical technique makes this variety exhilarating. . . .\u00a0 When Wallace writes with\u00a0 this kind of assurance, as he does most of the time, there is not much to do but be grateful for\u00a0 the poems.”\u00a0 The Kansas City Star reviewer observed “these poems are tender, multidimensional and a pleasure to read.”\u00a0 Felix Pollak in Northwest Review<\/i> writes “The volume is, for several reasons, an extraordinary achievement.\u00a0 For one thing, it combines–really synthesizes–great technical\u00a0 skill with strong and genuine emotion.”\u00a0 And Lisel Mueller writes, “Ron Wallace has an inventive\u00a0 and witty imagination which takes him into all sorts of surprising directions.\u00a0 His work is not\u00a0 only sure in its craftsmanship, but humanly important in its subject matter and treatment.\u00a0 Best\u00a0 of all, it is exuberantly alive.”<\/p>\n

With his third collection, People and Dog in the Sun<\/i> (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987),\u00a0 Wallace takes Robert Pinsky’s advice in The Situation of Poetry<\/i> to “transcend the image without\u00a0 abandoning it,” by experimenting with a more discursive mode.\u00a0 Refusing to be bound by the mainstream\u00a0 truism “show, don’t tell,” Wallace pushes the lyric and narrative toward a poetry of statement,\u00a0 exploring his insistent subjects (love, death, illness, parent-child relationships), from a new\u00a0 perspective.\u00a0 He also moves from the personal mode popularized by the confessional poets of the\u00a0 sixties and seventies to a more public voice, examining such subjects as nuclear war, environmentalism,\u00a0 militarism, crime.<\/p>\n

Of\u00a0 People and Dog in the Sun<\/i>, Stephen C. Behrendt in Prairie Schooner<\/i> concluded\u00a0 “Wallace’s poems teem with the immense variety of life, keenly perceived and distilled through a\u00a0 sensitive consciousness in tranquility.\u00a0 Indeed, there is a certain Wordsworthian purity of\u00a0 observation and reflection here, a celebration of elemental nature and experience. . . . It is\u00a0 just such a shared sensory and intellectual immediacy, coupled with the clean lines of the verse, that makes these poems so moving.”\u00a0 And poet Mary Fell wrote “I am deeply affected by the voice, the body, the world in Ron Wallace’s People and Dog in the Sun<\/i>: real poems.”<\/p>\n

The Makings of Happiness<\/i> (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991) and Time’s Fancy<\/i> (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994) are something of a culmination of everything Wallace had\u00a0 done to date.\u00a0 Incorporating the lyricism, humor, and discursiveness of the first three books\u00a0 with a new sureness and expansiveness of voice and spirit, Wallace celebrates the power of love\u00a0 and landscape and the family romance in the face of personal and public breakdowns in a world\u00a0 whose security becomes daily more tenuous.\u00a0 The Makings of Happiness covers a wide range of\u00a0 human experience: music, religion, sex, art, childhood, adolescence, nuclear war, illness, and\u00a0 death.\u00a0 But it is Wallace’s wit and good humor, against undercurrents of sorrow and loss, that\u00a0 best characterize this poetry.<\/p>\n

Of The Makings of Happiness<\/i> David Wagoner remarked, “Again we have what we have come to\u00a0 expect with pleasure from Ronald Wallace:\u00a0 wit, intelligence, originality, and a growing and\u00a0 deepening insight into the mysteries of daily life.”\u00a0 Mona Van Duyn wrote:\u00a0 “Well, I certainly\u00a0 found happiness in reading The Makings of Happiness<\/i>!\u00a0 Being has no ‘unbearable lightness’\u00a0 here.\u00a0 The poems are fat (a recurring word) with memory, love, humor (don’t miss the poem about\u00a0 poetry, ‘Building an Outhouse’) the world (the poet’s parents, wife, children, the goats, chickens,\u00a0 cats, frogs, fox).\u00a0 And there are many nourishing servings of sound and sense, all as in the huge ‘The Fat of the Land,’ a feast to set against ‘the non-caloric dark.’\u00a0 And yes, there are,\u00a0 during this picnic of a book, times when lightning strikes and the hair rises.” And Fred Chappell\u00a0 in The Georgia Review<\/i> concludes about Wallace’s characteristic mode, “the picture might\u00a0 have been painted by Bruegel, Rubens, and Botero working in collaboration. . . . [He] possesses\u00a0 a high excellence.”<\/p>\n

With Time’s Fancy<\/i> Wallace reveals a darker and deeper voice, one more meditative and\u00a0 complex, less sanguine, perhaps, about the tragedies of daily life.\u00a0 Without sacrificing the wit\u00a0 and humor, the synthesis of technical skill and strong emotion, the sensory immediacy, of his earlier\u00a0 work, he embraces the declarative voice he had introduced in The Makings of Happiness<\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0 The book includes a variety of traditional forms, including several highly difficult examples\u00a0 rarely seen in contemporary poetry–ballades, canzones, a pantoum.<\/p>\n

Time’s Fancy<\/i> was awarded the Wisconsin Library Association’s Banta Award in 1995. About\u00a0 this book, The Minneapolis Star Tribune noted: “With this fifth collection of Ronald Wallace’s\u00a0 poems, Ed Ochester has added yet more distinction to his Pitt Poetry Series.”\u00a0 Jacob Stockinger\u00a0 in The Capital Times commented, “Somewhere among those major cultural milestones, probably with\u00a0 poets like Richard Hugo and William Stafford, you’ll find Ronald Wallace, whose images, words and\u00a0 themes, ring with a distinctively American idiom.”\u00a0 Laurel Speer in Remark<\/i> insists “When\u00a0 Wallace succeeds at this level, he justifies the whole art of poetry.”\u00a0 Michael Bugeja in Writers Digest<\/i>\u00a0 states, “Ronald Wallace’s voice is as varied as any poet writing today.”\u00a0 And Publisher’s Weekly<\/i> concludes, “Part of what sets Wallace apart from other poets who write about personal and family life is his virtuosity with complex forms. . . .\u00a0 Yet Wallace is no mere technician; he weds\u00a0 considerable formal command with grace, passion, intelligence and wit.”<\/p>\n

Wallace’s sixth\u00a0 poetry book, The Uses of Adversity<\/i> was published by the\u00a0 University of Pittsburgh Press in 1998. The result of a project Wallace undertook to write a sonnet a day for a year, the book collects 100 out of the over 400 he completed (see his article on this project elsewhere on this website). Written in\u00a0 such a concentrated period, the sonnets are closely linked, providing a uniquely coherent structure\u00a0 for the book.\u00a0 As with Wallace’s earlier books, the language is often richly textured and musical, often plain-spoken and conversational, but always witty and accessible.\u00a0 The subject matter ranges\u00a0 widely from Rootie Kazootie and Froggy the Gremlin and Howdy Doody and Elvis Presley, to Christopher\u00a0 Columbus, Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Kevorkian; from Donald Duck and Mandrake the Magician and Li’l Abner and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, to Shakespeare, H.P. Lovecraft, Transtromer, Rilke, Wittgenstein,\u00a0 and Nietzsche; from the traditional themes of lyrics–love (both sacred and profane), death, the\u00a0 changing of the seasons, marriage, birth, divorce, childhood, sex, religion, art, the natural\u00a0 world, illness–to the most unexpected and quirky contemporary narratives. The title sequence\u00a0 (after the line from As You Like It<\/i>, “Sweet are the uses of adversity”), represents Wallace’s\u00a0 final exploration of his father’s illness and death, and is both elegiac and celebratory.<\/p>\n

With Quick Bright Things<\/i> Wallace turns to short fiction in a book of interrelated stories\u00a0 and short-short stories in which a dress factory worker reveals his disturbing secret, a laconic\u00a0 farmer targets his hapless quarry, a son suffers the guilt of his father\u2019s illness and death, a\u00a0 reclusive vanity publisher gets caught in a clash of cultures, a Mayan sacred well exerts\u00a0 its\u00a0 strange influence, a mother and daughter debate their animal rights, a husband and wife turn\u00a0 kindness\u00a0 itself into a weapon.\u00a0 Although the individual stories stand by themselves, they can\u00a0 also be read as a sequence of episodes in the life of Peterson Kingsley and wife Christine and\u00a0 their two children, Jennifer and Phoebe.\u00a0 Moving from country to city, and from internal to\u00a0 external conflicts, the stories trace the difficult journeys (social, sexual, psychological,\u00a0 intellectual emotional), that any marriage must take in a struggle to endure.\u00a0 Ranging from the\u00a0 heartbreaking to the humorous, these stories always return to the question of whether tolerance,\u00a0 good temper, and sympathy can prevail in the face of destructive forces within and without,\u00a0 whether “things”, despite their confusion, can somehow remain both “quick” and “bright.”<\/p>\n

Wallace\u2019s seventh book of poetry, Long for This World:\u00a0 New & Selected Poems<\/i>, was named by the St. Louis Post Dispatch<\/em> as one of the “eight best poetry books of 2003,” won the Council for Wisconsin Writers Poetry Book Award, and was named a notable book by the Wisconsin Library Association<\/p>\n

Wallace’s eighth and most recent book of poetry, For a Limited Time Only<\/em>, won the Council for Wisconsin Writers Poetry Book Award and the Society of Midland Authors Award in 2009, and is available from the University of Pittsburgh Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Published Works Ronald Wallace\u2019s first published books were works of scholarship, though he is perhaps now better known for his poetry.\u00a0 His first scholarly book, Henry James and the Comic Form, published by the University of Michigan Press in 1975, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":21,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-27","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/27\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117,"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/27\/revisions\/117"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}