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

Nathan Hoks

Assistant Professor, Adjunct

Contact

Bio

BA, 2000, Loyola University Chicago; MFA, 2003, University of Iowa; MA, 2005, University of Wisconsin - Madison. BooksReveilles, Arctic Poems (translation); The Narrow Circle, Moony Days of BeingNests in AirPublications: 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

What do writers and artists do with surplus, with extras, leftovers, and other excesses of production? Is there a creative use to put them to? When viewed in the context of ecology and economy, what are the ethical dimensions of working with surplus? Are there also ethics and aesthetics of the ¿useless¿? With these guiding questions, this course will explore creative approaches to waste, and develop revision practices that draw on the reuse of material surplus. We will consider forms of excess (literary, artistic, economic, material, etc.), and examine diverse types of waste and things that ¿waste¿, including literal trash, ruins, the body, time, the dream, and everyday texts (such as emails, text messages, rough drafts, conversations, and ephemeral media).

Class Number

1903

Credits

3

Description

Many hands make light work, so why not write our work together? In this workshop, we¿ll investigate and try out common methods of creative collaboration. We¿ll explore forms of linked verse, round-robin stories, call and response poems, collaborative poems, and cross disciplinary collaborations (text+visual, text+music, etc). Students will be expected to work in rotating teams, conceiving of and composing work together. At their core, these experiments will forge new ways of engaging creative processes and communities, while also calling into question traditional notions of authorship, ownership, individualism, communication, intention and chance. Touchpoints and readings will likely include Japanese renga; Dada and surrealist collaborations; Eliot¿s Pound-edited The Waste Land; Stones by Frank O¿Hara and Larry Rivers; quadri-lingual sonnets by Octavio Paz, Charles Tomlinson, Jacques Roubaud, and Edoardo Sanguineti; sound poems by Tracie Morris and Vijay Iyer; and more. Be ready for a highly interactive environment.

Class Number

2120

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