Doren Robbins: California Poets Part 9, Five Poems

Doren Robbins

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Doren Robbins

Five Poems

11 Chomsky on C-SPAN

It was an allegory. The imploded moods. The Greek shaman Tiresias’

trained birds went mad 450 B.C. We come to conclusions. I don’t,

you might, she wouldn’t, I’ve tried, who can tell, I don’t trust who

will, or who should. Either circumstance. They launch their own

humidities. Barometers are not the issue. You could die stoned in

your car or involuntarily fail to. What made what led to that. The

sane person idealizes tenderness as remedial surgery. Anyone’s

disgust looking at the system. Thay call putting your life on the

butchering line processing table, “a tour.” The contrivable fabricates

well in The Empire. You can wish them plugged bowels, Parabowels,

no sauce in their apples, dog stones in their bubbling bath. Ever the

accomplishment. Innocuously lived with. Not always against our will.

Their will. We underrate consequence. We excel at it. No, we

disregard consequence. I dream in vascular bundles. There’s an

inconsistency in the report. I wasn’t on the graveyard shift answering

phones for EMT. I drove, destined to delivery work in Studio City.

The valley of addresses. Later. Colorado Avenue to the Writing Lab,

to Lincoln Boulevard, flying on a Triple Turkish, sometimes with

whiskey, to work with Alberto “The Lone Night Owl” Flores, Ivan

Petraglyhpos and Princess Cleveland for assistance organizing their

sentences, a group report on the Brazilian Rain Forest loss of birds,

disappeared moss, fungi, tribe evacuation, no longer biological

anthropological Rain Forest resemblances in the biological Rain

Forest recorded ecological record. Tolerated evaporated volition.

Came out of someone’s depression without someone handling the

depression drug part of the confrontation. The seed myth dream.

Two mastodon tusks. Flat. Ribbon shaped. He didn’t know what

they were. They’re nineteenth century corset hoops. Why the

Pleistocene detail? Ended up on something like an eggplant. He

wasn’t uncomfortable to the point of changing things. He adjusted

his pants. It was eggplant. Or grapefruit. Something he arrived on top

of. A blurred-out post-it stuck to his knee. The reliverance (I know

how it’s spelled). People uninterested to explain what you find

incoherent wait at the counter. Wherever he was a cashier. Wherever

he was a student. Law of the land, lord of the worms. Maybe no one

beat him. No one beat him literally. That’s what was going on.

Document recovered from “Rewind after you.” The fact he was not

closer to Millie and he didn’t dream about Mindy. What if it isn’t

about that? Why all this concluding that long this way? There’s

no obligation. It’s about deserves. Lack of tenacity. Tenacity of

restriction. Disruption’s continuity. It’s right there in the gorilla

print. There were hieroglyphics of snails, mostly in mating positions,

one appeared to be expiring. Hall’s Balls!––they ate the dung of

woodpeckers! Some reluctant. Some uncontrolled. Wait, we’re

getting C-SPAN again. We were waiting to hear Noam Chomsky on

C-SPAN. We will probably hear it forever. Started right in, “Capital

(money). Deregulation, the upper 1% population, their entire half of

the stock market, which is capital (money), theirs, whoever’s left,

10% stash and exhaust the rest. Our fairy-tale economy.” The

annulment metaphor. Media One Cable programming. No fairytales.

No slap fights for them. Time allotted: four minutes max. Two weeks

before the AT&T- Media One buy out began. Don’t be silly, Clinton

was in power, Goldwater was in power, Bureau of Land Management

was in power. The Emergency Broadcasting Alert System, “it’s a

test.” They’re “testing equipment.” Westinghouse Electric was in

Power. “Viewers will be informed. There might be an emergency.”

Equipment, it’s about the equipment. “It may be necessary...

programming might be interrupted. Several times. It’s a test.

Extended periods…” It’s only a possibility. Corporate etiquette. The

customer. The “inconvenience” apology etiquette. It may be

necessary. Their apologization. Chomsky never returned. Don’t

bother. Chomsky was having a diet coke. Chomsky kept talking to a

map on the guest room wall. The four-minute duration expired.

Media One confirmed: Chomsky had to go to North Korea. Duct

taped TV voice. Emergency Broadcasting arrest-i-file. Don’t be

crazy. Chomsky kept interpreting the subversive New York Times

Opinion Page quotations manufacturing resent. The naturalism of

nationalism. The print in his mind was too small. He needed a break,

he needed his magnifying glass, there was only a fountain telescope,

he’ll be right back. Chomsky’s numbers’ game research exposé.

Media One de-programmed 60 of 89% of us. One last “apology for

the in-convenience.” The anorexic formality. The customer. The

customer. Chomsky is a Cuban name. He ran out of the studio to

smoke a Cuban cigar. His cell phone was made by subaltern ACLU

anarchist engineers. His cigar could’ve been laced with something. It

was his grand daughter’s wedding. She married an Iranian weapons

designer. The Chomsky’s are sociopaths. Taped live in Washington.

27

Minister Carpet was Virgil Carpet. The way he swung a hammer

we called him The Chopper. Said to call him Virgil. Insisted you call

him that. Not the soft “g” “Virg.” Not “Gil” with the always hard

one. But Virgil. The name itself incredulous to our style of names.

Even Vergible Woods changed his name to “Teacake.” There’s

a name. 

Long fingers portrait

We called him The Frog. We called him The Brute. Wore those black

stubbed work boots. Looked short, leather coverings for human

hoofs. Said he might as well be loading boxes again for Bill Hurnis

and his German-Pinscher son. For this kind of money, might as well

be sweating it out at The Imperial Club playing five-and-ten-dollar

Lowball Blind.

We called him Pug or The Mutt. Dayshift ended he hummed along

in his head to Mr. Farfel’s “Mica, Mica, Parva Stella,” “Twinkle,

Twinkle, Little Star.” He played it on the inward whistle. It was

Mr. Farfel’s accordion with lyrics version he played back in his head,

stuck on the intervocal, on the “c” in mica, on the “k” in twinkle.

His remedial hang-up. One of them. In his camper after a nine-hour

shift at Dint Construction and Maintenance, his head and arms

moved erratically, the tape turned up all the way, smoking what he

smoked. That guy was in a caffeine gasoline World Cup listening aura

to express what it must be like.

Laid off he used to walk past two in the morning. People told him it’s

not a smart time to be out. He said anyone seeing him walking after

two in the morning looked at him like he was more insane. There’s

no belonging. You stay vigilant. Isolation. The other kinds of

vigilance failed. Good Fortune has its own Salt Pit. Stuck from what

happened, what didn’t happen, what never penetrated. Lacked the

capacity to originate or operate. Maybe in advance. Everything’s the

culprit. Habituated to the culprit. You can friction arousal. You reach

a mechanism––you reach a mechanism. What happened? Nothing needs

to happen. Incidental harmonies. Erratics. Virgil Carpet. Mostly

raveled fragments carried him. Resemblances. There was Menace.

Not always perceivable. Menace ridicules perception. What details.

They weren’t just standing around storing it up on the side waiting

for the big moment. They weren’t just squeezing their whistles

calculating the payoff dateline. They arrived with enormous flags.  

They had more than the tying a dog to a tree in the yard and never

returning syndrome. They expressed their grievances in business suits

and white sheets. They came for abandoned foreclosures. They came

for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. They already spent The

Treasure of the Sierra Madre. What are they the Devil? Who cuts

their checks? They have their own Koran Analects Sutras Ten

Commandments. A single Chivalrous code. Their own manner “of

disordering of all the senses.” Doctors of Unreason. Not for their

likes. They too experience Maslow’s theory of self-esteem and self-

actualization. Wild beasts with principles half-Armenian Isaac Babel

called them. They descended from the Great Gnat Clan. There’s no

scientific consensus on what constitutes a gnat. They’re described

flying in large numbers themselves described as clouds.­­ What is the

total count in the phrase “flying in large numbers” or “rampaging

hordes”? What is the total count for Otto Schubert’s ink drawing

“The Suffering of Horses in the War 1919”? What happened at the

front of the customer service line, referred to in an interview, what

stared down the title of Teddy Plentikoff’s painting, “At the Counter

with Amputations 2003 to 2023”?

12

Under the central stairway skylight Cora drew a face on the wall.

Thick blue eye shadow she thought made her look older. For Mitchel

the photographer. His Wavecrest apartment. Venice. One room

kitchen bedroom front room closet. She worked in a “wiring jungle”

crimping wires, twisting wires for appliances and components. All

women. Smaller faster hands. Stayed ten hours for less than eight

hours the pay. Mitchel ran a bath for the nervous lovers. Tim Hardin

sang out of the stereo the way a hummingbird feeds. The way a

hummingbird worries. She remembered the voice hid truculence. She

put a root belonged to her into him. Mitchel. He displaced it quick

enough. Whatever he was lucid about, it was more luck than

discipline. Two scrambled in that loss. Long streets. Every night they

walked. The lost part they couldn’t map out. Unpopulated lands

dominated their map. His mouth and her chin. The abstract pleasure.

How pleased he was he attracted you was the expression in his

eyes. What she meant. Moist and steady. Not in the figurative

insanguination sense. Some other sanguine. Not yet known to them.

But the swerving feeling. Picked up from the rug and saved in a

drawer his imitation leather Bolo tie. She didn’t call after two months.

Someone in a dream, no longer here, memory won’t terminate. Flies

flies flies.

17

She did then she stopped. In four months he wrote 113 letters to her.

He had a file. She didn’t answer the last 112. He put a Haiku in every

letter. All of them bad. Some with twelve, some with twenty-three

lines. A few with seven or eight syllables. It was during this period he

completed “The Poodle Sonnets.” What a fantasist he became. What

fuel. Now someone’s talking, someone known for his day and a half

of blunted clarity. Maybe every two months. Of all the wasted

erections. What a Creature from the Black Lagoon that side of him

lived inside of. He got used to that Lagoon. He added up the accurate

complaints. The authority’s word on it. Him in there defying in bulk

what brought this to happen. A condition with prolonged

digressions. His mouth felt uneven. The current version. He was

completely sand inside. Unripe sand. Where all the preferences are

made. Mindy V brought him cola, brown sourdough slices, Spanish

and Greek cheese. They were on the homecoming train. They were

on the ground that inseminates itself. Her earrings were pewter rams.

She said, When you sleep my rams will lick your neck.

            22

What am I, a human mockingbird, no mock left? You get to the

point there’s no recourse altering what you don’t want to happen,

happening. It adds up. Pledged the wrong allegiance. Tell him that.

He filled-up on the ginger green onion baby corn oyster sauce over

the rice, the prawns, the little cock-like nipple-like Chinese

mushrooms, whether he’d have room for the he couldn’t believe it

miso garlic agave semi-sweet-basil cashew red chili pickled lime part

or not. He had his reasons. The year Lennon the Peace Activist was

shot four times through the back, through the lungs, through the

Norwegian Wood of his shoulder blades, by Chapman-Schmuckman

the Born Again-ist American-ist Murderer Inmate, I came through

the insomnia reading Hart Crane up to the line, “the bottom of the

sea is cruel.” It was a kind of turning point in the human personality,

to understand complexities of human personality, reduce the stability

of human personality to a form of ruined idealizations in the

personality, and down you go. I don’t disagree. He didn’t always have

the problem. It’s the schism prevalent feeling. I was there two years.

That naturalism. Against ourselves. Underestimation. The dissident

talker’s gripe-a-tite.

It’s an ode to vigilance to show up this long. What if it’s distorted

vigilance. Maybe it’s not an ode. The whole robust-athon is what

I mean. The inclusive negate-athon. It’s a swarm of bees. Their

rhythms. Including the dwarf bee, the beekeeper’s bi-polarism, down

to the latent rhythm, the mental stinger, your interior cop, the subnet

mask, the clown’s hat, no circus, secretion following secretion, the

derision of parts, derisory and derisoritis, down to the cigar squat, the

lament, all poli-spam, every unserviceable desire. From Passover

sardines to The Year of the Monkey. When wasn’t it The Year of the

Monkey? Or The Butcher? Adjunct to Ass-lick. All-Time Part-Time

all the Time Incorporated. Work you down to the shitometer. Do

you think they won’t get to that? That that hasn’t it got to that? We

Big Brother ourselves. There’s still a lot of movement with one good

wing. Even if that dewinging the life out of you system isn’t over.

The feeling’s mutual. The dog on the neighbor’s roof reminded him. 

Of what, no one else needs to know. He didn’t mean Aesop and

his talking animals’ morality. He missed those days. Minutes

metabolizing. Reckoning. Shuffling back together. There was…I’m

coming to…it ended up…I’m interrupted. I’m all excuses.

Interview

December 27th, 2025

California Poets Interview Series:

Doren Robbins, Poet, Fiction Writer, Editor, Artist

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Visual art is a huge component of your career. At what point in your life did you discover a passion for it?

DR: I’ve practiced portrait and fantasy in drawing and watercolors since I was child, when my older brother, the artist Gary Robbins, taught me art fundamentals and would critique my work. He had authentic tact as a teacher. He had a caring mind. My brother would periodically receive classic art prints in the mail, for instance the likes of Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Gericault, Van Gogh, Lautrec, Cézanne, and these images absorbed me naturally; my memory of the sensation in the words of Emily Dickinson, “There is a certain slant of light ... where the meanings are.” Since my late teens and twenties I’ve studied Modernist art and poetry (and still do). Exposure and influences came out of the permanent and traveling exhibits at LACMA, the New York museums, and travels in Europe. The connections I made to Bosch, Breughel, Goya, Cezanne, Klee, Picasso, Braque, Chagall, Kollwitz, Arp, Matisse, Henry Moore and Giacometti formed a deep saturation of imagery and technique on the ground of my creative process. For a short period in my late twenties, and later since I was forty-three, I started to make works I could find an imaginative identity and relationship to without feeling a sense of lack. There were several exhibits at LACMA in the 1990s that were formative.

Lasting impressions came from a German Expressionist “Decadent Art” exhibit, and another on Collage, Photomontage, and Dada. The photomontagists Hannah Höch and Wallace Berman had a unique effect. From my early teens on, I’d see Wallace Berman’s art displayed in posters around the borscht belt area Laurel Canyon, and West Hollywood, advertising exhibits or poetry readings. The unusual arrangements of photographs framed in radio, transistor radio, or television screens were perception-altering to a thirteen-year-old. I can see how my conception of the artist as a fabricator and fantasist began with these unforeseen experiences. There was an intuition of perception of visual content for interior tools.

DG: What parallels do you see between visual art and poetry, between mixed media and hybrid forms of writing?

DR: My focus of study and practice concerned literature exclusively for long periods, until I read the international library of the most significant works, and had a grasp of multiple theories that attempted to clarify the evolution of generational innovation, meaning, and enhancement of literary consciousness. But I was drawn to William Blake and Kenneth Patchen as poets that seriously made visual art. I came later to Jean Arp, who had a stronger directing influence. What I came to disagree with concerns the notion of illustrating written texts. For me, this became a passé practice. Braque’s Illustrations for Theogony by Hesiod are an exception, Daumier’s “Don Quixote” is a crucial homage and aesthetic footnote. Sometimes I fabricate text with images, but my sense of “hybrid” form came when I decided that visual art in my books will not be made exclusively to illustrate the ideas in the written text. Some are, and I am severe about their necessity; but most form a simultaneous experience with the writing. Simultanism in art and poetry along with Cubism are my foundation. Blaise Cendrars’“ La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France,” (Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France), a pamphlet poem he made with artist Sonia Delaunay-Terk, impacted my sensibility with impressions and a technique to present layers of perception and poetry. An example would be the mixed media work, “The Siren He Came to Know,” from my book Twin Extra: A poem in three parts (Wild Ocean Press 2015). There is nothing directly related to a mythological siren in Twin Extra, and nothing in the language illustrates the mixed media image. The written text and the visual image are inferences to each other. They belong together, but don’t need each other. Their juxtaposition is a paradox.

DG: In 2008 your prose-poetry statement was included in Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California, edited by Christopher Buckley and Gary Young. In it you address the form-and-content direction you’ve taken for the last twenty-five years ago. The statement is relevant for the five unpublished poems featured in California Poets Part 9. Would you like to share it here?

DR: Yes, here’s the statement: I do not work in formal structures, but I have worked diligently to create “free verse” and prose poem styles that retain the dynamics of what Walt Whitman called “the poetic quality.” My [then] recent book, Parking Lot Mood Swing: Autobiographical Monologues and Prose Poetry (2003), is formulated in prose, but it still retains poetic elements and qualities dynamically concerned with rhythm, repetition, metaphor, dream consciousness, lists, parallelism, diatribe, satire, elegy, comic-hyperbole, dramatic and interior monologue. The subtitle points out distinctions within the genre, that is, imaginative memoir and monologue are a part of my prose poem style in Parking Lot Mood Swing. It is well known that Ford and Pound believed poetry should be at least as well written as prose; the opposite is also true, especially in terms of sensitivity to sound, not to mention an active rhythmic phrasing flowing directly or erratically as emotional tone forces arrangements of meaning. Usually let down by what poetry omits, not to mention the glib self-satisfied manner of its implicit sense of such omission, I prefer exploring the works Celine, Miller, Beckett, Marguerite Young, Bellow, Kundera, Vonnegut, the Austrian monologue-novelist Thomas Bernhard, Roth, Morrison and Stephen Dixon (in his novel Gould). Yes, there are exceptions in poetry, and I am not arguing for the dominance of anything here; writers, once they find themselves, do what they like, that’s no secret. We know of Baudelaire’s desire to break out of poetry into prose, and within his means he is very successful. Ginsberg makes a strong contribution to the genre in “Supermarket in California,” “Howl” and “Kaddish,” but little has been said about the disappointing chant form in the concluding parts of each of the longer poems, and his poetic obligation to add those passages. Shakespeare’s incidental prose scattered throughout his plays deliver lively examples of prose poetry: “Bottom’s Dream,” Iago’s monologue of directives to Roderrigo to “put money in thy purse,” and Falstaff’s interior monologues on the battlefield toward the conclusion of Henry the Fourth, Part One, are examples of narrative prose poetry that continue to inform me. And there is room for psychological dimension and rich association concerning the narrator and other characters as Vallejo and Edson show in their prose poems. As a reader and as a writer I have a strong drive for the moment of serious or comic epiphany or non-epiphany that leads to insight. I found many of my “poems” dragging because they sometimes contained subjects demanding greater exposition, fantasy, and rhythms not measured by poetic prosody; something other than lyrical, condensed, image-driven lines. That continues to be the basis for my abandonment of any notion of lineation.” 

In a period of Whitman research before that anthology I discovered scholar Betsy Erkkila had pointed out how Rimbaud’s prose poetry was directly influenced by translations he read of Whitman’s long-lined common language poems. More could be written on Faulkner’s influence on Ginsberg, not only for raw subject matter and serio-comic morbidity, but how the repeated “who” clauses in Howl appear directly inspired to the ones Faulkner uses in Chapter 6 of Absalom, Absalom. There has been an inter-genre breakthrough since Baudelaire’s originating prose poetry and poetic prose ideas. Despite the generally facile lyric-narrative identity poetics currently in fashion, the poetry-prose-monologue expression containing fuller content and fantasy continues to evolve.

DG: You’ve taught writing and English Composition in various settings. How do you structure your lessons and how do these activities inform the writing you do?

DR: It’s an intricate process so, briefly, for Composition, my criteria for SLO (Student Learning Outcome) was based on elucidating critical and ethical thinking for the purpose of students employing critical reasoning in their reading and writing. This first-year course always focuses on non-fiction texts, and on how to employ types of rhetorical tools for arguing a position on a significant subject. There is one basic lens I encourage students to utilize for their analytical positions, it comes from a short critical thinking pamphlet we study by Linda Elder and Richard Paul I used over the years, The Miniature Guide to Ethical Reasoning. In the opening paragraph they state, “The proper role of ethical reasoning is to highlight acts of two kinds: those which enhance the well-being of others––that warrant our praise––and those that harm or diminish the well-being of others––and thus warrant our criticism.” This is about as convincing of a Democratic Principle put into words, easily understood, hopefully empathized with, that I could engage students with to form a reasonable humane position. As the Bush-Cheney-Trump era has exposed, Elder and Paul’s humane position is not always tenable or desirable for some people. But this much smaller population of very few students had to reasonably confront the limits of their contention. A couple of their essays were discussable without sounding like William F. Buckley or Steve Bannon. Notwithstanding the lack of compassionate aptitude, you don’t have to have read Socrates, The Sermon on the Mount, Montaigne, Martin Buber, or Kropotkin to comprehend the common sense and human decency inherent in the statement in our ethical reasoning text.

For literature courses, Introduction to Poetry, and Introduction to Shakespeare, the scope centers on a foundation-making knowledge of vocabulary. That is, you have to teach all of the elements of literature; historical contexts; the sociology of stratified hierarchy, anti-feminism, trauma, racism, along with questions undermining the emotions and imaginations of speakers and characters. But I taught these concepts incidentally to the rare qualities of the poems, fiction, and drama. The momentum of interest and interactive dialogue is partly scripted, the rest relies on the intensity, comprehensiveness, and humor I taught with when I was on.

There is a separate approach to teaching Creative Writing. My style was not as set in place as it was with teaching composition and literature. On the one hand, there were readings and assignments for both critical thinking and imagination, but I was attempting to bring students closer to their imaginations by structuring assignments on remembering and writing down dreams or catching themselves in their personal stream of conscious so as to contact the fantasizing source and material of their personalities. I referred to the self-discipline as “found cinema in dreams and fantasy.” I still adhere to this idea, but it is difficult to teach transformation of habits.

Students certainly had to present a connection to the realism of experience in their writing, but they were encouraged to say what was unspeakable or unthinkable. There was empathic interaction in these classes. There was laughing and sometimes crying. Twice there were epileptic seizures.

I do not believe in writing for “the general reader.” I don’t even register the idea. The audience that comes to readings or buys literary works is usually composed of writers, teachers, literary students, or people interested in developing their writing. I enjoyed the work. The focus was on increasing reading habits, being astute, subjective, and hopefully publishable on your own terms.

One thing, I don’t place teaching above my enthusiasm working the line and running kitchens or working as a carpenter and remodeler of homes. My professions demanded consistent organization, problem-solving skill, refined accuracy of technique, and an enhanced sense of quality. There was also a more “non-collegial” mutually supportive comradery in the two blue-collar trades. I don’t know to what degree these professions inform my writing. I had to make a living. The fact I ended up in these three professions is complicatedly a part of my character, desires, upbringing, and personality. They are incidental to my preternatural sense about becoming a poet-artist, when I did.

DG: I’d like to talk about your past editorial activities, specifically that of Third Rail, a literary magazine you co-founded with poet Uri Hertz in the mid-seventies. Some of the biggest names, including Henry Miller, appeared in those pages. Could you talk about what you were trying to do with the publication that was different from what others in the literary establishment were doing?

DR: When we started out we shared an enthusiasm for Henry Miller, Blaise Cendrars, Antonin Artaud, Lorca, and Allen Ginsberg. We wanted to discover writers carrying on in that tradition. Easy to say when you’re twenty-five. Both of us reached out to some writers in the older established generation, and they responded. We passed on the ideas we wanted to pursue in Third Rail to George Hitchcock of Kayak, and he recommended we send him 100 copies of a request for submissions, and he would send them back in the return envelopes he received for Kayak’s magazine submissions. We started building content and subscriptions. Our sensibilities were driven by Modernist and Late Modernist works and theories in literature and art, and the more inclusive content inherent to the Beat Generation. I admired what was strong in Bukowski, but we included established though neglected local poets William Pillin, Bert Meyers, and the nearly forgotten Beat poet William J. Margolis. In the first Third Rail there was Walter Lowenfels, Henry Miller, and Kenneth Rexroth mixed in with new younger poets. It was a fertile period in Los Angeles. Bill Mohr’s Momentum, Leland Hickman’s Bachy, and Dennis Cooper’s Little Caeser were active. Clayton Eshleman’s magazine Caterpillar was the most dynamic to me.

Caterpillar (and later Eshleman’s Sulfur) contrasted Los Angeles poetry magazines as in-crowded, and crowded with flat personal language, apolitical and unconnected to historical realities and the relevance of the unconscious in international Modernist poetry and art. We liked what the other magazines were doing, but wanted to relink with that radical imagination tradition. For five issues we had a good enough collaboration. Our anti-nuclear issue #4 had a strong effect. Then I had to walk away for personal reasons.

DG: What do you think about the literary establishment today?

DR: There is the mainstream, a couple university presses, and everything else. The literary establishment is conservative, pathetic and apathetic. There’s a melting-pot free for all of online journals, which I support. But there is a lot of immaturity and lack of accountable sensibility. Covid, or what’s coming next, put an end to public readings. People will defend Zoom, but I believe most literary people find it inauthentic to literary performance. But “the literary establishment”? They support what is made to sell. They generally recognize nothing that disturbs the notion “everything is going okay.” Or okay enough. For them The System Works. The ideas inherent to the avant garde or political and working-class consciousness are anathema. “Unsuitable” is what they like to say. The diction of pompous asshats. They officially support power as policy. Overall, literary institutions fund mediocrity, or the lesser insulting homogeneity. The NEA is continuously under some form of censorship. Some of it of the wrong kind. They have always run scared for the same reasons the universities capitulated to Trump’s Academic Freedom and First Amendment repressions. The criteria for success is spelled out. Writers I can still read are outside the literary establishment. Over the years I’ve been active, a few lucked into the money (and titular prestige of NEA grants and Guggenheim fellowships) out of sheer skill. The odds are unshakeable. It is folly to set out to please “the literary establishment.” You become a poet or artist out of urgency and common sense; it is possible to have an effect on your own fate.

DG: Dissidence and social justice have been at the heart of your work and you’ve really lived (up to) the tenets of your writing. What have you done as a cultural activist to further social causes and how much of your poetry, would you say, is born out of that activism?

DR: Years ago, poet Austin Strauss and I organized a poetry event for The Western Region Amnesty International Conference. I think the reading was at Claremount College, or an auditorium in Claremount. We read for at least an hour, Walt Whitman, Nazim Hikmet, Paul Celan, Langston Hughes, Thomas McGrath, Pablo Neruda, Kenneth Patchen, Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Levine, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Adrienne Rich, Yannos Ritsos, Antonin Artaud, and others. They were an enthusiastic audience, and someone should research the political activism of Austin Strauss.

In the early 80s I donated two poster poems, each with a half-tone watercolor, one for The Salvadoran Medical Relief Fund, the other to support Dr. Charles Clements who worked with common people victimized by the civil war. He later wrote a book, Witness to War, that was turned into the short-subject documentary of his experiences, which won an Academy Award.

For Sam Hamill’s Poets Against the War, I contributed the poem “Natural History” and donated the mixed media with poem poster “Predator’s Hour 2, Open All Night” to benefit his Anti-American-War in Iraq. During the Salvadoran civil war, poet David Wade and I organized a reading at the Church in Ocean Park against the war in El Salvador. The reading featured Clayton Eshleman, Denise Levertov, and Jerome Rothenberg. Rothenberg made a remarkable performance of his poem “Strike,” dedicated to Jack Hirschman. You could feel his whole poetic being in the recitation. There was large crowd there to take it in.

But there is no activism. No direct affiliation to organizations or political parties. My specific political poems and art are incidental to the way I live, my anxiety and disgust. Sometimes when you’ve had enough, your obliged to act.

DG: Dylan Thomas has been a huge influence, and the political nature of his work is clearly evident to those who’ve read it. Would you say that discovering him led to the awakening of your own political consciousness?

DR: Dylan Thomas, Langston Hughes, Kenneth Patchen, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan are my originating poetic influences. Their anti-war, anti-hate values are mine. The poem “My Own Dylan Thomas” says everything I want to express in my adulation of Dylan Thomas, and what his work and life means to me. I studied all of his writings and listened to his poetry readings with intense devotion. He was an inspiration and his poetic vitality came through a human dramatic voice I will never forget. He was a lovable poetic spirit. He was an enchanter; someone who had the capacity. He changed my life. His alcoholic martyrdom is a crucifixion. It is a sickening fact of the mid-twentieth century world.

DG: Another big influence has been Kenneth Rexroth, likewise a staunch political activist but also an avid artist like yourself. Could you talk about how you first met, the influence he had on your work, and why younger poets, just getting into the art, should study him?

DR: I discovered Kenneth Rexroth while reading Henry Miller’s book on Arthur Rimbaud, and how the artist works through the madness of civilization. In The Time of the Assassins Miller mentions Rexroth’s perennial elegy to Dylan Thomas, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” The next time I had money I bought The Collected Shorter Poems and read his elegy to myself out loud with a surprised force of impression. I studied everything Rexroth wrote. Closely. His writing is not congested but layered with meanings, information, insights, subtleties of style, and allusions implicit to full intellectual expression. I still regularly read his essays. Whenever I read or reread classics I choose to review his essay on the work over someone like the erudite Harold Bloom, because I too often find the ego of Bloom’s self-promoting academic theories and Freudian platitudes slogging the design of his paragraphs. Moreover, Bloom is a traditional canon supporter, Rexroth’s sensibility includes the traditional canon, as well as the radical canon not traditional enough (repressed enough) to be assimilated. The lucidity and the comprehensiveness of Rexroth’s analysis and insights are original and intellectually poignant. He’s an accomplished revealer of meanings. An enthusiast of refined literary expression. He understands what makes literature irresistible and entertaining.

For a sound understanding of the forces and materials behind modern poetry, students of poetry should read his book American Poetry in the Twentieth Century, his essays on the influence of French poetry and the influence of Japanese poetry on American poetry. His introductory essay to his book of translations of French cubist poet Pierre Reverdy is a thorough preparatory lesson for understanding the dominant shift in sensibility that Modernist poetry entailed.

Around 1970 I was beginning to write poems to some effect. But I needed a mentor. I needed direction. I wasn’t in college. I had a degree of academic contempt. I was too defensive and unpredictably vulnerable to participate in a writing workshop. I had no idea what an MFA Program was. I thought Iowa City was an oxymoron. I thought of contacting Kenneth Patchen in Palo Alto for advice. He died about three weeks later. I had been reading Karl Shapiro, and I considered writing or calling him since he was teaching close enough at UC Davis. Shapiro interested me because of his prose poetry, his commentaries on literature, and his passionate introduction to Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Around that time, my old friend Jim Lava who was studying to be a doctor at UCSB, told me I should go to Rexroth’s class. When I told him I was a poet he got excited and started telling me about this poetry, song, and performance class he took at UCSB. I had mentioned Kenneth Rexroth, and he said, that’s the poet that teaches the class. You should go up there and introduce yourself. Several weeks later I found the time and place of the class and drove up there with a folder of twenty poems. I saw Kenneth Rexroth in the lobby and went over to introduce myself and ask him if I could read my poems in his class. He looked me over taking me in, then became congenial saying, “Of course you can, of course ... I’ll see you inside.” We were mentor-student poet friends over the last ten years of his life.

Students should study Kenneth Rexroth for the reasons I mentioned, but also because he is, like William Carlos Williams, an original narrative-lyric poet who infuses his language with an elegant or when necessary more vernacular diction that will have a positive effect on creating a sense of sound, the personal sense for “an ear,” for the aptitude of your own voice. His voice is intense and convincing in the Dylan Thomas elegy, as it is nostalgic, erotic, and direct in his love poem “Oaxaca 1925.” Once I said to him, I was lucky to find you.” He told me, "You created the luck.”

DG: What’s the purpose of a good poem? Must it challenge the reader like Pound’s Cantos do or should it be more Whitmanesque—not a discovery of the actual poem at hand but an actual self-discovery through the poem being held in one’s hands?

DR: I discovered this purpose in poems I had to read repeatedly over years for the impact they had on me. The works of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams, Cesar Vallejo, Muriel Rukeyser, Philip Levine, and Adrienne Rich were important for me to find the words in my own expression. The most lasting effect came from Francois Villon, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Antonin Artuad, Nicanor Parra, Allen Ginsberg and Gerald Stern. There are certainly tools you learn about from studying Ezra Pound. They are sometimes overlooked or he is written off, because of his Amer-Aryan psycho-social-pathologies. His advice to poets, his “son of a pig-headed father” poem, the “botched civilization” images, his “Hang it all Robert Browning” language style possibly derived from Celine’s intensity of revulsion, are all lively, but he is revolting as a person ethically. I believe it is a malady that messes with his coherence and judgement. The Cantos are ghoulishly impersonal and lack a mature fecundity of subject matter, but you see a well-controlled, almost, at times, fluid sense of stream of consciousness and narrative collage form, to learn from, if you intend to.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

DR: I completed a trilogy of monologues, Hostage Libido, Recordations, and Voicer. Sandy Press published my current book Itinerant Dreamer (84 art works with related essays and poems). In 2026 they will publish Images appropriated by titles (63 art works with related essays).

I almost gave up on William Gass’s The Tunnel, then on page 257 I read, “It does not take a mind for there to be madness; we have always been mad; madness was before mind; then contagion takes place ... seeping inside the soul ... the syph ... contagion ... the syph of religion, hey? The VD of belief, the clap of commerce .... So keep kosher, okay? So keep your cock in your fist, okay? Hey? Keep safe ...” The Tunnel is coherently rough in some passages and transitions, but it is one of the books.

Lately I’m reading randomly for insights I’m not aware I’m consciously looking for and insights I might’ve missed. C.G. Jung’s The Red Book and the James Hillman/Sonu Shamdasani book on the Jung’s book, Lament of the Dead; Claude-Levi Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques; Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power; a reread of John Berger’s Another Way of Telling, a re-read of Swann’s Way in the recent Lydia Davis translation, and a reread of I Paint What I want to See, writings by and interviews with U.S. artist Philip Guston. I will stop with a quoted portion from Guston’s interview with poet Clark Coolidge:

CC: I have the feeling I’ve dealt with these things, but I haven’t thought about some of them, you know what I mean? I guess you feel this way, too.

PG: Sure. Well, you talk about discontent ... I think discontent precisely has to do with, and I guess I must put it sort of blatantly, it has to do with the disgust with art.

CC: Yeah.

PG: I think the greatness of Beckett, really, is that deep and lifelong profound disgust with art. And, paradoxically, that’s why he became a great artist. But if you go into this devil’s work, there’s no insurance you’re going to come out.

CC: Yeah. Right.

PG: And the reason there are hundreds and thousands of good, safe artists is because there’s a threshold which some are perhaps aware of, others not. And those that are aware of it don’t want to pass that threshold.

CC: That’s why I say, it’s not that I’m so discontented with my friends who are poets. I’m just discontented.

PG: Yes, I know what you mean.

CC: And therefore I’m discontented with their lack of discontent.

PG: Of course.

CC: I feel like: I’m discontented, what’s the matter with you guys.

PG: Yeah. Why aren’t you discontented?

CC: What did you say, “devil’s work?" You know what Melville said, that famous quote? He wrote to Hawthorne, after he’d finished Moby Dick, and he said, “I’ve written an evil book...” [...] He saved himself somehow. He went there and he came back. It’s like going into a deep psychosis and coming out [...] Which is what R.D. Laing and those guys believe, that you go through your psychosis. You go all the way into it and you come out. You don’t try to stop it with psychoanalysis or drugs or something. You go through.

Author Bio:

Originally from Los Angeles, Doren Robbins is a writer and an artist living in Santa Cruz. His writings have appeared in Kayak, The American Poetry Review, Electric Rexroth, The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Lana Turner, Sulfur, Poetry International, Miramar, and Third Rail Journal of the Arts. Selections of his art have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Caliban, Cholla Needles, Empty Mirror, The Houston Literary Review, Otoliths, Paterson Museum of Art (writers that are artists exhibition), Pensive, SULΦUR surrealist jungle, Red Wheelbarrow, Third Rail Journal of the Arts, Utriculi, and in The Ontological Museum New Acquisitions Catalog, and others. In 2025 Sandy Press published his book Itinerant Dreamer, a collage of genres (84 art works with related poems and essays). https://www.sandy-press.com/

Past collections of his poetry, Driving Face Down and My Piece of the Puzzle were awarded the Blue Lynx Poetry Award 2001 and the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award, respectively. His book Twin Extra: A Poem in Three Parts from Wild Ocean Press was nominated for the 2015 Jewish National Book Council Award in Poetry. Sympathetic Manifesto, Selected Poems 1975-2015 now out of print, was published in 2021 (Spuyten Duyvil Press).

As a poet and an artist Robbins organized readings and produced posters to benefit The Romero Relief Fund and The Salvadoran Medical Relief Fund during the Salvadoran Civil War; and for poetsagainst-thewar.com at the beginning of the American-Iraq-Afghanistan Wars. His writing has been awarded fellowships and grants from Oregon Literary Arts, The Loft Foundation, The Chester H. Jones Foundation, The Judah Magnes Museum. Robbins taught creative writing part-time at UCLA Extension, and composition, critical thinking, and ethnic literature part-time at East Los Angeles College, Santa Monica College, and CSU South Gate, before taking a tenured position in creative writing and literature at Foothill College 2001-2022. He was Director or Advisor for the Foothill College Writers’ Conference 2001-2009. Professor Emeritus 2017-2022.