Doren Robbins

Doren Robbins is a poet and artist from the West Coats: Los Angeles, Oregon, Santa Cruz). His poems and artistic works have appeared in many journals, including Lana Turner, Salt, APR, Sulfur, Red Wheelbarrow, Kayak, Another Chicago Magazine. In 2021 Spuyten Duyvil Press published Sympathetic Manifesto: Selected Poems 1975-2015.  He lives in Santa Cruz and teaches writing courses at Foothill College.

From Prose Poetry Statement of Craft for Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California (ed. Christopher Buckley and Gary Young 2008). 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 book, Parking Lot Mood Swing: Autobiographical Monologues and Prose Poetry, 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. 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, Philip Roth, Thomas Bernard and Stephen Dixon. 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. 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, something other than lyrical, condensed, image-driven lines.