Ballads / Richard Owens.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Owens, Richard, 1973- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetry, Modern.

Small press books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 132 pages) : illustrations; PDF, digital file(s).

Edition:

Second edition.

Place of Publication:

Brooklyn, NY punctum books 2015

Buffalo, NY : eth press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

text file

Summary:

Originally published by eth co-director David Hadbawnik’s habenicht press in 2012, Ballads uses the lyric form to explore the effects of global Capitalism from a sharp Marxist perspective. Recognizing the congruence between folk song circulation and the circulation of money, the “currency” of the ballad alongside supply-side economics, Owens hails Wordsworth’s Lyric Ballads experiment (undertaken at the dawn of England’s Industrial Age) as one touchstone. But he also understands the built-in obsolescence of the form, its tendency to hearken back to imaginary origins. “[E]veryone has an idea they know what a ballad is,” Owens writes in his “Working Notes.” “It’s this degraded thing shot through with a sense of pastness, cultural infancy and a charming but sometimes dangerous rusticity that needs to be carefully framed and reined.” Thus Owens’ Ballads playfully engages with language, figures, and forms from medieval and early modern England, with nods to the caesura-based, alliterative line, and Barbara Allan, Thomas the Rhymer, and Piers Plowman making appearances in the book’s brief lyrics.

Notes:

First edition published by habenicht press, 2012 --title-page verso.

Description based on electronic version of record (viewed on June 16th, 2020).

Other Format:

Print version:

ISBN:

9780615983936

Access Restriction:

Open access Unrestricted online access