Directories

Sympathetic Manifesto: Selected Poems 1975-2015
http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sympathetic-manifesto.html

These Selected Poems will be interesting and useful for students to read, as they creatively display an arc of emotional and artistic development from youth to late middle age. That is, the book forms an autobiography from early twenties' chaos to a type of maturity developed through the arts, travel, types of work, marriage, and family.

Doren Robbins grows evermore himself, evermore an original and reliable critic, prophet, singer. His poems are ever richer, combining now unfaltering powerful and tender memory with wisdom. Real wisdom. And he's writing the best political poems I know.

Gerald Stern



Apocalypse Contemporary. Critical overview of Sharon Doubiago's book of poems, Naked To The Earth (Spuyten Duyvil Press, New York 2019). Order:
http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/apocalypse-contemporary.html

With the vigor, breadth of reference, and passionate outrage to match his subject, Doren Robbins provides a masterful guide to Sharon Doubiago’s Naked to the Earth (Wild Ocean Press, 2017). Martin Buber’s philosophy of I - Thou guides Robbins’s critique as he examines the core concerns of Doubiago’s demanding investigation of contemporary America. For Doubiago, Buber’s I - Thou dynamic are both intra and inter-personal. She is a confessional poet whose “I” expands to meet the “Thou” of the suffering present-day world. Sex, including her life-long quest to recover from incest, older women’s experiences of being seen and not being seen, the havoc of war and racism, and the hopeless conditions of America’ homeless all converge in the poet’s courageous lens.


Robbins has written an essential, challenging analysis of a poet who embraces the world with maternal ferocity. Inspired by Doubiago’s oeuvre, his conclusion calls for liberating poetry from academic and corporate constraints, and for honoring poetry’s lineage and craft in works that inform, inflame, and authenticate American literary production.

Susan Suntree, author of Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California



Not Fade Away: Poetic Prose Monologues, Three Sequences (highmoonoon books, Los Angeles 2010).

On Not Fade Away:

“Now poet/collagist Doren Robbins has produced Not Fade Away, a collection of poetic prose monologues published by highmoonoon press in Los Angeles, in which he manifests a prise de conscience that he has been reaching for in his poetry and art constructions for decades. The book's title, Not Fade Away, makes reference to Irish poet Seamus Heaney's version of a medieval Irish epic in which a man, cursed by a saint, is transformed into a bird. Robbins' book is a series of monologue-mosaics that could be considered poetic improvisations in which he sets himself free to explore synchronous and asynchronous correspondences through the language of his psyche. One senses ghosts of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Henry Miller, James Joyce and others who have explored these magnetic fields in the past century, but Robbins' routines have the virtue of having been home grown in the crucible of living as a thinking, questing literary artist in a time that violently refuses and rejects any force of consciousness that is capable of penetrating ideological constructs holding corporate/oligarchal rule over the superstructure in place.” -Uri Hertz


From the publisher on My Piece of the Puzzle:

"Doren Robbins' latest collection, My Piece of the Puzzle, is as open and immediate as letters from a friend, albeit a friend who feels deeply the accumulated weight of experience. Suffused with an almost defiant tenderness, the poems speak of love and dispossession and loss, and of the power of memory to resuscitate fragments of our lives. They are at once a howl of finely tuned outrage at the world's unyielding brutality, which we can at times withstand only by becoming brutal ourselves, and a celebration of the human need to find something that endures to conjure meaning from impermanence."

Praise for My Piece of the Puzzle:

These are remarkable, fiery poems. Poems that would urge any poet on, language that tears open reality. I think this is Doren Robbins' finest book, and I've admired his work for a good while. The imagination, its energy and precision, is immense. There's a delicate observation of even the rawest materials, a tenderness for humanity in all its cruelty, stupidity, and often invisible dignity and grace, that feels to me like his peculiar, original contribution to--well, to the puzzle of what we have become: people, Americans, men and women today, above all those who are "absent," unregistered, undocumented in both senses.

Adrienne Rich


Doren Robbins's poems are both poignantly personal and boldly political. They are passionate and lyrical, as you expect of the best in poetry. He is a keen observer of family life as well as the larger world outside, and a pleasure to read.

Howard Zinn


For interview, live readings, selected writings and mixed-media art works go to:


https://dorenrobbins.wordpress.com/videos-audio-interviews-wikipedia/


Other books: Twin Extra: A Poem In Three Parts (2015). Nominated for The Jewish National Book Award. His 2008 collection, My Piece of the Puzzle, was awarded the Josephine Miles PEN Oakland National Poetry Award for 2008. The 2001 collection Driving Dace Down received The Blue Lynx National Poetry Prize.

All 2021-2022 classes are Online:

Fall/English 1B


Winter/English 17 Introduction to Shakespeare


Spring/ English 11 Introduction to Poetry

The best way to reach me is through Email.

robbinsdoren@fhda.edu

Travel, world culture, all modes of writing, philosophical Ideas, all forms of artistic expression, education, working-class realities, nature, civil liberties, ecology, economic justice, tragedy, satire and absurdity.

For comprehensive bio go to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doren_Robbins
https://dorenrobbins.wordpress.com/

For selections from poems, mixed-media art works, and upcoming poetry readings, go to my web site:

https://dorenrobbins.wordpress.com/

"Complex seeing must be practiced."

Bertolt Brecht



"Being calm amounts to a failure to understand one's true situation."

From Susan Sontag's essay on Antonin Artaud



"Art itself could probably not produce the renascence which implies justice and liberty. But without it, that renascence would be without forms and, consequently, would be nothing."

Albert Camus