Owens Circles Back to Teach English at SCCC
By Cheryl Conway
SCCC Adjunct Journalism Professor
After 18 years of teaching, Dr. Richard Owens, instructor of English, has returned to Sussex County where he was raised.
Photograph by J. Jeffreys
How poetic it is that SCCC’s Richard Owens has circled back to his home base doing what he enjoys the most!
“I have an enduring love of literature, particularly the poetry and poetics from ancient times (i.e., Gilgamesh, Hebrew Psalms, and Homeric epics) through to the absolute present,” he shares. Hence, he inevitably became a teacher specializing in English, writing, and literature.
Since 2006, he has taught at several institutions, including the University at Buffalo, Buffalo State College, the University of New England (Biddeford, Maine), Bunker Hill Community College (Boston), Southern Maine Community College, and the University of Southern Maine.
This past fall, he began teaching at Sussex County Community College in Newton.
“It seems Sussex chose me,” explains Owens. “I applied for the position but in the end, faculty and administrators here were generous and gracious enough to accept my application. Although I have taught throughout the Northeast, I was raised in Sussex County and, shortly after being discharged from the U.S. Army over 20 years ago, I attended several classes at SCCC and have wonderful memories of studying Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and many other poets here at Sussex.”
For his first semester at SCCC, he taught six sections of Composition I, “which is pretty intense,” he admits. This semester, he is mixing things up by teaching Composition I, Composition II, and Modern Poetry.
“Exploring the terms of poetic work in Modern Poetry this semester seems incredibly exciting to me,” he admits. “Investigating really basic questions can be really useful, especially where this concerns concepts and practices we take for granted.
“What, for example, is a poem in the first place?” he asks. “This may sound like a silly question, and it is in a way, but if we put serious critical pressure on this question, and we definitely will in Modern Poetry, I think we will find — or at least I often find — that after many years of study, I
still have no real clue what a poem is and there is a kind of amazing joy in troubling and challenging what seems obvious, self-evident, and seemingly simple. We will look very closely, very critically, at an outrageous boatload of astounding poems from the last two hundred years as we think collectively and collaboratively about what a poem is and what could be more exciting than that?” says Owens.
Learning from a professor with years of experience as a teacher, writer, and lecturer has its benefits.
“My student-centered approach to teaching writing and literature is based on a lifetime of intense intellectual curiosity and rigorous study,” says Owens. “It is hard to know what this really means, but thinking and talking giddily, with absurd enthusiasm, about writing and literature can be infectious and spread like a kind of wildly healthy contagion — and this is to say, regardless of what path a student chooses to pursue, the courses I facilitate actively invite students to imagine themselves as full intellectual citizens capable of, and even responsible for, sharing their lived experience and their thinking wherever they go.”
Owens also takes pride in his availability to his students.
“I am always available to speak with, I am scarcely in a rush, and there is nothing more worthy of discussion than the wondrous literature, poetries, and culture that populate our minds as we tend to our families, work our jobs, and move deliberately through the world,” says Owens.
Owens Bio
Richard Owens is a full-time instructor in the Department of English. He earned his B.A. (2003) from Montclair State University and his M.A. (2009) and Ph.D. (2013) from the University at Buffalo, where he completed a critical dissertation on mid-twentieth century poetries titled “To Shrink the Confines: Anglophone Poetry, Political Economy, and the Space of History.”
His critical essays have been published in many scholarly journals, including Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Chicago Review, and Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies. His poetic work has appeared variously in little magazines, online journals, and book-length publications which include Song of the Constant Sea (Shearsman 2021), Poems (BlazeVox 2019), Ballads (Eth Press
2015), Embankments/Outtakes/Uppercuts (BlazeVox 2010), and Delaware Memoranda (BlazeVox 2008).
He has delivered conference talks nationally and internationally on a range of topics specific to twentieth-century and contemporary poetry. He also served formally as a peer reviewer for Paideuma and edited and co-edited several significant volumes devoted to Modernist, late-twentieth-century, and contemporary Anglophone poetry.
