Ron Wallace's Retirement Reading

[title type="subtitle-h6"]Chandler Adams[/title][vc_row][vc_column width="11/12"][vc_column_text]On Thursday November 19th, in the spacious Alumni Lounge of the Pyle Center, Ron Wallace, founder and Co-Director of the UW-Madison Creative Writing Program, held his retirement reading before past and currents students, colleges, and of course, family and friends. After a heartfelt introduction by Judith Claire Mitchell, the College of L&S’s Jartz Fellow, during which she promised Ron there would be no speeches or testimonials on his behalf, Ron stepped up to the mic. He joked at first, saying: “If I had known I’d have an audience like this I would have done this long ago.” By this point the reading had become “standing room only” and people were encouraged to find any place they could to sit on the floor. After a few moments speaking on his retirement and what lead to his decision, “I’m really really really really tired,” said Ron, and moved on to the reading itself. Ron chose to structure his reading as a “retrospective,” reading one poem from each of his eight major books as well as nine of his newer poems. He started with his first book Plums, Stones, Kisses, & Hooks, choosing to read the first poem he had published in The New Yorker entitled “Oranges.” He introduced it with a touching story. While writing the poem he had thought his wife, Peg, would disrupt the flow of the poem with her sudden presence, yet she “walked into the poem and made it an even better poem.”“Oranges” begins a as poem about eating an orange on a frosty winter morning. The tang and smell of the orange permeate the poem weaving through each line and image and providing a calming mood to the poem. As the poem shifts in the second stanza to a trek across a frozen lake, the color and brightness of an orange create a sunny and sharp scenery that perfectly resembles a brisk winter morning. The last stanza, perhaps when Ron’s wife walks her way into the poem, becomes a love poem. The speaker and an unnamed woman are transformed into oranges themselves and their love slices through their rinds to reveal the tender insides.  Ron’s poems, while rich with meaning and poignancy, also often revealing a wonderful sense of humor. As someone who had never heard any of Ron’s poetry, I laughed along with everyone else, and was surprised by the goofiness of many of his poems. Every poem he read came with a short anecdote that illuminated the inspiration behind them and made each so much more personal and intriguing. Somehow Ron manages to reconcile a sense of simplicity as well as a deep complexity in each poem that leaves the listener in awe of how easily the poem is understood.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]