Bob Hicok.

BLACKSBURG — Bob Hicok is a calm and collected man, with a voice that always has an even softness to it.

One would have to strain one’s ears to hear him from even a minute distance — which, one would think, wouldn’t be the best quality for an English teacher.

Yet, somehow, this doesn’t pose a problem for the 45-year-old’s classes.

Despite Hicok’s reserved tones, his voice is never drowned out by his students’.

When he speaks, they listen, because they know that when they speak, he will listen just as well.

The classroom is Hicok’s environment. The students are his people.

“I like being around young people,” Hicok says. “I like being around folks who have not necessarily struck off in a particular direction.

“There is something about the energy of this time that is so unique. It makes me feel like I’m back in school.”

Hicok has been teaching poetry classes at Virginia Tech for more than two years.

Not having an advanced degree until after he came to Virginia Tech, Hicok considers himself lucky to even be on faculty.

Then again, when you’re a poet who has been nominated and received several awards as well as having been published in The New Yorker, perhaps luck has nothing to do with it.

Luck or not, Hicok knows how to run a classroom.

It’s simple, really — just let the students speak, and when they speak, listen.

Follow up with blunt yet helpful advice.

As writer and critic David Kirby puts it, “Bob Hicok comes off as the smart, quiet guy in school that everyone listens to.”

Also, it helps to truly understand the students you’re teaching.

Hicok, having never lost his youthful touch, doesn’t have to level with students — he’s already on the same level they are.

And after all — what aspiring writer wouldn’t want to take advice from someone who’s been in The New Yorker?

“He [Hicok] was always very attentive,” said Michelle Billman, a Virginia Tech junior who is majoring in communication studies and English.

“I always felt like he looked at my work honestly. He’d really go above and beyond. He’d tell you when your work was good and when it was bad, letting you know exactly why it was bad and how I could fix it.”

Though, to be fair, it took Hicok some years to get on the ball with his poetry.

He didn’t start publishing his poems until after age 30, even though he had been writing avidly for more than 10 years. His real work then was in the die industry, as the owner of his own company, Progressive Technology.

During this time, poetry was merely a hobby for Hicok.

“I had done a little bit of poetry in school,” Hicok said. “When I was 19 or 20 my girlfriend broke up with me and I started writing. I originally wanted it to be song lyrics but mainly it was just me dealing with the breakup.

“I liked it and I kept doing it and eventually I started attending readings and open mikes. The response was very good, so I just kept going. There was no plan. It just kind of happened.”

Having grown up in a household where all ambitions and aspirations were encouraged, Hicok dived headfirst into the published author pool rather fearlessly.

“A friend of mine was literally told by her family that she wasn’t wanted,” Hicok said. “And she never got over that. My experience was just the opposite.”

Hicok got started in teaching at Western Michigan State University as a visiting poet.

“Teaching was something that I always wanted to try but had never gotten the opportunity,” Hicok said.

Hicok liked it, and soon afterward he got a job in the English department at Virginia Tech.

For Hicok, the teaching process is in itself a creative experience. He teaches the same way he writes.

“The fact that I don’t know what someone is going to say in the classroom or what they might say about their poems is endlessly surprising,” he said. “And to get that into my life at my age, at 45, is a kind of rebirth.

“Teaching is not at all like the typical working environment. There’s variability. I’m going to be going in and talking about poems, certainly, but I cannot predict how any one class is exactly going to go, and in that way it’s a lot like writing. That’s where they link up for me. Teaching is as improvisational as writing is. You just don’t know.”

Much like the energy of his classrooms, Hicok’s poems go all over the place.

They are about medicated roommates that he’s lived with in the past. They are about humanity’s sexual quirks, eavesdropping on total strangers, eyeless trout and his own disappearing hairline. They range from straightforward narratives to abstract, stream-of-consciousness think pieces.

“I like having poems that you pick up and you have no doubt what is being said,” Hicok says. “I also like poems where, if you get anything, it’s probably a feeling.”

His students have taken notice.

“He taught me that being a writer is not about sitting in class; what really makes you a writer is sitting at home and writing every day and being passionate about it,” Billman said.

Such writing has won Hicok some awards and nominations, but the biggest by far was his nomination for the National Books Critics Circle Award, which after a Pulitzer and the National Book Award is the largest award you can win as a writer.

For many writers, this kind of recognition can create a stifling amount of pressure.

When Hicok writes, he tries to keep that kind of pressure as far out of his mind as he possibly can.

“There’s definitely a desire on my part to win something like that,” he said. “The pressure is there, it’s internal.”

In today’s America, it’s hard to keep a firm grip on one’s dreams while still maintaining the necessities.

Hicok, as well as anyone else, understands the difficult tasks that life sometimes demands.

But, with a little patience and ambition, those 10 or so years at the 9-to-5 day job can pay off.

For Hicok, it certainly did.

“There’s so much to be said for trusting the energy you have,” he said. “You may have to take a crappy job and keep going to school while working on your music, or whatever it is.

“You can provide for yourself financially while still pursuing your dream, even if you don’t know what the dream is. You follow that which you enjoy, always ready to make a shift. … To start letting go of too many things because you don’t know what you want to do can be deadly.”