Doren Robbins

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.

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 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.

Doren Robbins began actively publishing poetry in the 1970s.

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.

Clearly, as explored in his essay The Tropic of Rabelais, the Passage to Whitman: A Note on Poetry and Community, and his prose poem, Sympathetic Manifesto, honoring the anarchist organizer, lecturer and teacher Voltairine de Clerye, Robbins' working-class political sensibility is not simply one of dissidence and alienation.

It could be stated that several of his poems from his earlier collections, such as For Pablo Neruda, Hooker with a Lily, They're Honking at a Woman, The Boss Jack Sterner had a Dream, Collecting Myself, or the later poems My Pico Boulevard, Gregor Samsa's Face, Her Friday, and his more recent poems Dignity in Naples and North Hollywood, Latina Worker, My Piece of the Puzzle, and Before and After Tampico display direct parallels to Marx's compassionate diatribe in his chapter "Alienated Labor" from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, but the underlying thematics in Robbins' political poems are anarchist variations of the claims he made in the...Rabelais...Whitman essay alluded to above: Really, if our values are at all valuable, it would be a process of false logic to believe in anything that has to do with the world powers.

The very fact that they have the means to help but no active concern for whole populations of unemployed, marginally employed, underfed people—aside from turning them into submissive robotized satellites of exploitative disgrace—shows that these powers are an invention of the ethically dispossessed."

Again, as in his Neruda poem, the notion of legendary individuals takes precedence over the social conditions they have pitted themselves against—de Clerye as a teacher and organizer is celebrated for her devotion to alleviating economic violence to immigrants and the poor, Neruda for a comparable political consciousness in his poems and his activism in Chilean politics; with Rabelais and Whitman he states that ''we never feel they are artists in the way we understand Antonin Artaud or William Burroughs to be, as understandable as their positions are—their work is almost exclusively a violent depiction of a desperately avaricious and alienated world, it is a literature of revolt, revulsion, and frustrated purgation.

With Rabelais and Whitman we have the literature of liberation: imaginative, sexual, worldly, and above all humane''.

Ultimately, Robbins' writings containing social issues can not be easily classified.

On the one hand, his narrator cogently, even passionately explores and exposes injustices his characters' endure.

There is a sense of working-class rage.

Moreover, these poems have the effect of elegies to the actual human values abused by the world capitalist system and the various branches of the soviet communist system.

However, his conclusions, if there is a remedy to be found in his writings, might be said to be founded in a poetically reductive idealism; for example, he concludes the prose poem "Sympathetic Manifesto" with these final lines: "I will always believe in the Revolution, and in something better: the rarer action, said Prospero, is in Virtue than in Vengeance" (60).

And he concludes his essay on Charles Bukowski by stating that "To survive without adding to the horror is sometimes the best we can do; it is at least an effort that makes sense as a starting point. There is courage, discipline, and cunning in the effort. Finally, what remains after a poet's survival, which is not an inconsequential matter in our culture—is the art. In the art of Bukowski the most central theme, both comically and tragically, is simply the passion to exist, to take it as it comes, recount what it was all about, and, paradoxically, recount the butchery done to that passion, and the butchery endured, by humans."

Finally, there does not appear to be a consistent "reductive" quality in his interpretations and conclusions but a variety of crucial insights and problem-solving or lamentably unsolvable approaches; here his path of interpretative and representative response and expression finds allegiance with Bertolt Brecht in his statement that "Complex seeing must be practiced."

They remained in contact until Rexroth's death in 1982.

Union Institute, BA, 1990.

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.

The University of Iowa, MFA, 1993.

Two years post-graduate studies in literature, multiculturalism, and criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1994–96.

Robbins was director of the Foothill College Writers' Conference 2003, 2006–2008.

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.

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.