Doren Robbins

Robbins' first prose collection, Parking Lot Mood Swing: Autobiographical Monologues and Prose Poetry, certainly displays an affinity with Sterne's enlightened absurdities and non-liner style in Tristram Shandy. His prose poem essay in Bear Flag Republic notes with appreciation the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Young, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Thomas Bernhard, Stephen Dixon, and Kenneth Patchen of the previously noted Journal of Albion Moonlight. Such works as "Chaucer's Quill, Sappho's Libido, Frida Kahlo's Eye Brows", "Dealing With the Insomnia Surf", "Pantagruel Antigruel", "As Much Sex as Elvis", "Green Torso", and "Whitman, Artaud, and the Punk Nation", from Parking Lot Mood Swing appear to be a natural form for supporting his drive to include in a serio-comic poetic language subjects and details usually left out of poetry. Whether these "omissions" are implicit to the ongoing decorum of lyric poetry, or if the matter revolves around the restrictions of lineation as compared to the reality of including unlimited material expressed in rhythmic sentences, Robbins recent publications indicate he has opted for working in this genre along with his ongoing lyric-narrative output. Supporting this claim are several prose examples published after Parking Lot Mood Swing, such as "Alternate Robonovich, Adjunct", "Nothing but an Ear", "Arlon's Talking to Himself Memoir", from the forthcoming novella, Twin Extra (Highmoonoon 2010); and "Just My Luck", "My Defects Call Me Back", and "Night Song" from the Bear Flag Republic prose poem anthology.

Doren Robbins has published poetry, prose poetry, short fiction, literary criticism and book reviews in over one hundred journals, including The American Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Hawaii Review, Indiana Review, International Poetry, Kayak, Onthebus, Paterson Literary Review, Pemmican, Sulfur, New Letters, 5 AM, Willow Springs, and Hayden's Ferry Review. In spring 2008, Eastern Washington University Press published a new book of poems, My Piece of the Puzzle. His previous collection of poetry, Driving Face Down, won the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. In 2004, Cedar Hill Publications published Parking Lot Mood Swing: Autobiographical Monologues and Prose Poetry. A mixed media artist as well as a writer, two of his works are currently on exhibit at the Crossing Boundaries: Visual Art by Writers exhibit, held at the Paterson Museum in New Jersey. His collage-portrait of Kenneth Rexroth, "Angles with Fissures", appeared in the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center documentary film, Kenneth Rexroth Centennial.

While the poems listed above are products of a sensual, emotionally confrontational, and melancholic sensibility, "Badlands and Outlands" (Double Muse 1998) is the longest and most ambitious of his love poems. As compared to the overall compilation of his poems exploring divisions or celebrating sex and intimate companionship, "Badlands and Outlands" is a meditation on a divided and partially formed personality, a possibly undependable sexually charged partner who is still aware of the potential for a way out of marital commitment. The narrator observes his habits and behaviors with their sometimes self-destructive drives (self-destructive in the sense that intimate trust is damaged by lust); he faces "not exhilaration,/ not imagery, [but] some other shore/ where celebrating stops […]" And yet, there is "…the sustaining presence / of Venus Janakosov" and, finally, his connecting attraction for her is "crested, empathic, vulgar." The poem, for all of its self-destructive plunging and reflection is a commitment to marriage resonating with fertility and ambiguity: "momentary undermined attentions, in Florence—/ the fatigue and vibrant tone,/ the sunflower's hole cragged with seeds, in Florence,/ the frame without angles, in Florence."

In 1994, Robbins was a guest editor for the Japanese-based Literary Journal, Electric Rexroth. His selection of contemporary poets and prose poets included work by Sharon Doubiago, Linda Janakos, Robert Bly, Gerald Stern, Philip Levine, Ralph Salisbury, Ingrid Wendt, Clayton Eshlemen, Marvin Bell, and Tania Pryputniewicz. Robbins' selections for Electric Rexroth were informed by a desire to present poems that contested at least two of the crucial criticisms of contemporary narrative lyrical poetry: one, that imagery had become convenient rather than fresh and emotionally driven; and two, the anecdotal self-consciousness pervading mainstream poetry had resulted in a lack of urgency in speech rhythms, while the effects of sound had become routine to the point of cliché. The narrative idiosyncrasies, unique imagery and fantasy, idiomatic freshness, emotional and philosophical insights in Sharon Doubiago's, "Someone waiting for me among the violins," Philip Levine's, "The Simple Truth," Tania Pryputneiwicz's "Labor," and Gerald Stern's "Ducks Are for Our Happiness," are four of the fourteen selections that clearly stand as testimonials for the ongoing vitality of original expression continuing to generate out of the Whitman-W.C. Williams tradition, emphasizing poetry written in a common language close to American idiomatic speech. Two other works Robbins selected for Electric Rexroth, Robert Bly's "An Open Rose," and "Grandma's Myth" by Linda Drand (aka Linda Janakos), are, respectively, strong representations of prose poetry and the hybrid prose poem-short fiction form Robbins himself would develop in his 2004 book, Parking Lot Mood Swing: Autobiographical Monologues and Prose Poetry (Cedar Hill Press).

Robbins has been a teacher of Creative Writing, Poetry, English Composition, Shakespeare, and Multicultural Literature since 1991 at the University of Iowa, UCLA, East Los Angeles Community College, and California State University (Dominguez Hills). He has been awarded three times by the Foothill College Honors Institute for his teaching. Currently he is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Foothill College. Robbins was director of the Foothill College Writers' Conference 2003, 2006–2008.

Union Institute, BA, 1990. The University of Iowa, MFA, 1993. Two years post-graduate studies in literature, multiculturalism, and criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1994–96.

Influenced by several alternative poetry journals of the period, such as George Hitchcock's Kayak, Clayton Eshleman's Caterpillar, and Robert Bly's The Seventies with its emphases on "wild association", political poetry, and critical book reviews, Robbins co-founded the literary Journal, Third Rail (Los Angeles, CA 1975), with fellow poet Uri Hertz. He co-edited until 1980, remaining as a contributing editor until 1982. The avant-garde of the period had at least two specific modernist traditions. One, was the ongoing longer-poem development of a personal-historical, disjunctive, elliptical, interior monologue and collage form like that of Ezra Pound's Cantos, William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Louis Zukofsky's "A", and Charles Olsen's The Maximus Poems. The shorter, lyrical development continued out of the non-referential poems of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, the French "cubist" poetry of Pierre Reverdy, and the short, sometimes opaque poems of the American poets George Oppen, the aforementioned Zukofsky, and to a certain extent their inheritors Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and the Beat Generation poet Philip Whalen. On the other hand, Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Harold Norse, and Charles Bukowski carried on the Whitman tradition of the authentic voice, "I was the man, I suffered, I was there." Eshleman's Caterpillar combined both traditions, including that of European and Latin American surrealism. Similar to George Hitchcok's Kayak and Eshleman's Caterpillar, Robert Bly's magazine represented an international modernist faction closely related to surrealism, but a surrealism driven by emotional and sociological dynamics forcing the poet to invent a new imagery, not always aligned with rational analysis, as compared to a surrealism of "automatic writing" often leaving the reader with an alternate disappointment to that of the game of indeterminacy and abstract expression resulting in the majority of language poets. To this end Bly emphasized the works of Georg Trakl, Federico García Lorca, César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda in particular. There is a good deal of reductive theorizing and a certain degree of non-substantive depth psychology fantasizing in Bly's arguments, while his own poetry, surreal and otherwise, often struggles with the effects of sentimentality and bathos; however, his influence urging poets toward a more passionate sense of psychoanalytic personal and radical social awareness, imagery and association cannot be underestimated. For Hertz and Robbins, at least up to 1982, it appears the generally mutual focus of Third Rail was basically connected to the paths Kayak, Caterpillar, and The Seventies were taking. That is, there was a strong interest in continuing the development of an international poetry, generally written in a language Rexroth himself referred to as "the international idiom". From 1975–1982, Third Rail published works by Henry Miller, Walter Lowenfels, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Bly, Jack Micheline, Christopher Buckley, Douglas Blazek, Andrea Hollander Budy, Naomi Shihab Nye, Barbara Szerlip, Kazuko Shiraishi, Takahashi Shinkichi, Paul Eluard, Blaise Cendrars, Pablo Neruda, Juan Armando Epple, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Natalia Gorbanevskaia, Anna Akhmatova and many lesser known poets. The journal also published special sections on political events, such as "Poets on Chile, Neruda, Allende" (1976) and "Poets Against Nuclear Power" (1980). Hertz and Robbins conducted interviews with the internationally renowned Japanese poet, Kazuko Shiraishi, and surrealist poet and founder of Kayak Press, George Hitchcock. Robbins regularly published his poems in the journal along with critiques of the poetry of William Pillin, Philip Whalen, Bert Meyers, Clayton Ehsleman, Katerina Gogou, and Carol Tinker.

Doren Robbins began actively publishing poetry in the 1970s. In 1969, while reading Henry Miller's The Time of the Assassins, his study of Arthur Rimbaud, Robbins became aware of Kenneth Rexroth's poetry through Miller's reference to Rexroth's remarkable "Memorial" for Dylan Thomas, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," about which Miller stated, "If one has any doubts about the fate which our society reserves for the poet, let him read this "'Memorial.'" During this early period of development Robbins had preceded reading Miller's book on Rimbaud with The Diary of Najinsky, Van Gogh's Letters, Kenneth Patchen's The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Jack Hirschman's Artaud Anthology, and Wilhelm Reich's The Murder of Christ, making the connection to Rexroth's elegy for Thomas timely in the way that it lyrically and convincingly categorizes and specifies the violent multi-faceted alienation of society with the vulnerability and ensuing martyrdom of certain artists. As suggested by Robbins' prose poem monologue "My Dylan Thomas," the Welsh poet was an inspiration and an early influence. At age eighteen Robbins attended a production of Sidney Michaels' Dylan: A Play Based On Dylan Thomas In America By John Malcolm Brinnin and Leftover Life To Kill By Caitlin Thomas. The production was an inspiration adding to Robbins's continuing study of Thomas's poetry with a new emphasis on sound, voice, and prosody in general. After a five-year period of studying many of the key books of Western literature, philosophy and politics, Robbins decided to search for a way to contact Rexroth who had become—through his essays in Bird in the Bush, Classics Revisited, and Assays; along with his Collected Shorter Poems, Collected Longer Poems, and his many books of translations—his initial literary guide. Robbins discovered from an old friend attending the University of California, Santa Barbara, that Rexroth taught a course in Poetry, Song, and Performance at UCSB. At the evening course, Robbins introduced himself to Rexroth who generously requested he recite his poems during the class performances. For several weeks thereafter Robbins was a visitor-participant in Rexroth's poetry seminar held in his home in Montecito. They remained in contact until Rexroth's death in 1982. The events in 1971, and the ensuing friendship with Rexroth would prove particularly decisive for Robbins' development as a poet and essayist. It was at this time that he re-connected with his old friend; poet, translator, art curator, and publisher John Solt who had become friends with Rexroth and his wife, Carol Tinker.

Doren Robbins (born August 20, 1949 in Los Angeles, California) is a contemporary American poet, prose poet, fiction writer, essayist, mixed media artist, and educator. As a cultural activist, he has organized and developed projects for Amnesty International, the Salvadoran Medical Relief Fund, the Romero Relief Fund, and poetsagainstthewar.org. Robbins has lived most of his life in California and Oregon.