BA, Millersville University of Pennsylvania. MFA, University of Maryland. Hoch is the author, most recently, of poetry collections Miscreants (Norton) and A Parade of Hands (Silverfish Review Press). Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey (LSU Press, finalist for The Paterson Prize) and Radio Static (Green Linden Press appeared in spring 2022. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The New Republic, Washington Post, Slate, Chronicle Review of Higher Education, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other publications and were selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2019. Hoch has received fellowships from the NEA, Bread Loaf, and Sewanee writers conferences, as well as St Albans School for Boys, The Frost Place, and Summer Literary Seminars. Currently, he is professor of creative writing at Ramapo College of New Jersey, as well as guest faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College. SLC, 2012–
Undergraduate Courses 2024-2025
Writing
Poetry Workshop: Kitchen Sink Poetics
Open, Seminar—Fall
WRIT 3511
“Lacks one, lacks both,” Whitman says. “Just throw in the kitchen sink, why don’t ya,” my mother used to say. This is a poetry-writing wonder romp through a series of polar tensions that pervade modern and contemporary poetry. Through exercises, readings, and your own work, we will explore a variety of dichotomies/tensions that might enable us to engage our poems with a greater sense of presence and emotional possession. Occasion and directionality, intensity and intimacy, figure and ground, speech and writing, line and syntax, structure and body, eye and I...there are plenty of concepts and mechanics, concerns of craft and art, to throw into this course. Are they false dichotomies? Sure, but falsity has its own use; and the central use of falsity is to move us toward truth, to inhabit, to nest there. Primarily, we will be investigating and claiming the best ways that serve our poems—our sense of belonging with poetry—that either narrow our concern or expand our vision, or both.
Faculty
Previous Courses
MFA Writing
Poetry Craft: Kitchen Sink
Craft—Spring
This craft class will be a both a conceptual and and an exercise-driven romp through some of the more vexing, but healthy, dichotomies in modern and contemporary poetry: Intensity and intimacy/line and syntax/emotion and tone/speech and writing/lyric and narrative/voice and vocal acuity/address and angles of address/opening and closing/description and perception/craft and art. In each session, we will be bicameral: part lecture and discussion-based, part exercise, workshop and play. We will explore the mechanics and thinking behind some of these forces that shape how poems move, develop, and generate themselves.
Faculty
Writing
Kitchen Sink: A Poetry Writing Workshop
Open, Seminar—Fall
“Lacks one, lacks both,” Whitman says. “Just throw in the kitchen sink, why don’t ya,” my mother used to say. This is a poetry-writing wonder romp through a series of polar tensions that pervade modern and contemporary poetry. Through exercises, readings, and your own work, we will explore a variety of dichotomies that might enable us to engage our poems with a greater sense of presence and emotional possession. Occasion and directionality, intensity and intimacy, figure and ground, speech and writing, line and syntax, structure and body, eye and I...there are plenty of concepts and mechanics, concerns of craft and art, to throw into this course. Primarily, we will be investigating and claiming the best ways that serve our poems—our sense of belonging with poetry—that either narrow our concern or expand our vision, or both.