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

Contact

Bio

Nathan Hoks is a poet whose books include Nests in Air, The Narrow Circle, Reveilles, and most recently, Moony Days of Being. His poetry has been awarded the National Poetry Series, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and the Iowa Review David Hamilton Prize. He has also published translations of work by Vicente Huidobro, Henri Michaux, Tristan Tzara, and Christian Dotremont. He teaches poetry writing at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and lives in Chicago with his family.

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 and their multiple facets/personalities, 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, New York School poets, salvaging, sound poetry, and text-image hybrid forms. 

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

Wallace Stevens suggests that 'The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used.' We'll pursue this seeming paradox with exercises in meter and free verse, exploring both traditional forms, like sonnets, and experimental forms, like collage and serial poems. We read diverse contemporary and classic poets, write several poems, and workshop peer work weekly, culminating in a portfolio of new poems as a final project.

Class Number

2002

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

2087

Credits

3

Description

To write in any genre is a gesture that puts one in a relationship with predecessors and precursors. While this relationship is often constructed as a dialogue, it can also be a conflict, full of clatter, disagreement and intentional offensiveness. In this sense, the writer's mark crosses out the predecessors' work, and functions as an act of desecration. Furthermore, writing itself might internalize this structure, making a text that turns back on itself via contradiction and negation. In this seminar, we will read and look at various examples of desecration, and try them out in both our own and others' writing (for example, cutups, collages, erasures, etc.). We will draw comparisons with tendencies in both the visual arts and pop music, reading widely in modern and contemporary writing, likely including work by Tristan Tzara, Leonora Carrington, Ted Berrigan, Nikki Wallschlaeger, and Alice Notley.

Class Number

2473

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

2345

Credits

3 - 6