A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.

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Nathan Hoks

Assistant Professor, Adjunct

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Bio

BA, 2000, Loyola University Chicago; MFA, 2003, University of Iowa; MA, 2005, University of Wisconsin - Madison. Books: Reveilles, Arctic Poems (translation); The Narrow Circle, Moony Days of Being, Nests in Air. Publications: Denver Quarterly Review, Poetry Foundation, Writer's Chronicle, Fence, Bat City Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, Northwest Review, Bennington Review, Columbia Journal, Harvard Review, Crazyhorse, Columbia Poetry Review, jubilat, Lit, Agni Awards: Tomaž Šalamun Prize; National Poetry Series; Crashaw Prize; Linda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize; Millay Colony for the Arts Residency; Vermont Studio Center Residency.

Personal Statement

My student-centered mentoring process develops via conversation, a mutual process of listening and responding. I like to think of writing itself as a conversation—a text might converse with historical texts, with the writer, with readers, and (especially) with itself. Like any good conversation, we can’t have an exact idea of where we’re headed. The end point, if there is one, is discovered collaboratively through a process that involves imaginative listening and responding. In my own work, I draw on strategies to decenter the position of the artist (automatic writing, collage, procedures, willful amnesia, and rhythmic exercises) in order to give agency to writing itself. Some of my interests include Dada, Surrealism, and New York School poets. I am also a letterpress printer and publish handmade chapbooks with Convulsive Editions.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This class serves as an entry into the historical, theoretical and practical concerns of creative writing as an art form in itself and as a vital element of interdisciplinary projects. We explore the possibilities of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays and hybrid practices as writing for the page, as well as for performance, sound, installation, and image-based pieces. Students are assigned reading and writing exercises, and discuss each other's writing in workshop or small critique sessions.

Class Number

2116

Credits

3

Description

This class invites students to explore various relationships between science and poetry, two domains that, perhaps counterintuitively, often draw from each other to revitalize themselves. As poets and creative writers, we¿ll use, misuse, and borrow from science in our poems. We¿ll approach poems like science experiments and aim to enter an ¿experimental attitude.¿ From a practical point of view, we¿ll try to write poems that incorporate the language of science to freshen their own language or to expand the realm of poetic diction. Furthermore, we¿ll work with tropes and procedural experiments that may result in revelation, discovery, and surprise. Readings may include work by Aimé Césaire, Kimiko Hahn, Ed Roberson, Dean Young, Joyelle Mcsweeney, and Will Alexander. Students can expect to work on a semester-long 'experiment,' to write several poems, give a class presentation on their work, and complete a final portfolio.

Class Number

2123

Credits

3

Description

Might there be a kind of poem that acts like a parasite latched on to a host body? A poem whose very life is the fusion of various sources, voices, discourses? This poetry workshop invites students to read and write poetry that, either overtly or subtly, engages with other texts or weaves together various discourses. We'll examine ways that poems create intertextual relationships (e.g. quoting, voicing, alluding, echoing, stealing, sampling, imitating, translating...) and test out these methods in our own writing. While the focus of the readings and exercises will mainly be on poetry, students writing prose, fiction, or hybrid genres are invited to join and work in their own genres. Afterall, the theoretical concept of intertextuality comes from Bakhtin's critical texts on Rablais and Dostoyevsky! Readings will likely sample older intertextual models (such as ballads), as well as modern and contemporary explorations, such as work by Ted Berrigan, Terrance Hayes, Rosmarie Waldrop, Jack Spicer, Maggie Nelson, and others.

Class Number

2063

Credits

3

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

1953

Credits

3 - 6