The poet Ron Wallace can be described as “part Emily Dickinson and part Harpo Marx” because of his dark wit, which you can see in the opening of this sonnet:
The Bad Sonnet
It stayed up late, refused to go to bed,
and when it did it sang loud songs instead
of sleeping, disturbing its siblings–couplets, quatrains
in their small rooms, began caterwauling–
and soon the whole neighborhood was awake.
What draws me to his work, however, is what he writes about memory and how people remember. Here’s one more quote: “Memory squeezes us dry beyond sweetness, beyond weeping.”
Ronald Wallace, The Makings of Happiness (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,