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.

Clearly, as explored in his essay The Tropic of Rabelais, the Passage to Whitman: A Note on Poetry and Community,[6] and his prose poem, Sympathetic Manifesto,[7] honoring the anarchist organizer, lecturer and teacher Voltairine de Clerye, Robbins' working-class political sensibility is not simply one of dissidence and alienation.

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.

"[13] 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.

[17] On his web site, one of the quotes Robbins refers to from Albert Camus concretely supports the paradox of artistic skepticism: "Art itself could probably not produce the renascence which implies justice and liberty.

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."

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.

From 1975–1982, Third Rail published works by Henry Miller, Walter Lowenfels, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Bly, Jack Micheline, Christopher Buckley,[19] 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.

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.

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.

Most of these characters are family members or friends Robbins worked with when he was pantry man, broiler chef, deliveryman, book store clerk, or carpenter.

His poems "Anna", and "Dvayda", display the tradition of the legendary common woman linked to Chaucer's Wife of Bath with her exceptional forthrightness or Shakespeare's Emilia with her erotic honesty and her ethical, non-negotiable good will.

For Robbins, the Ars Poetica of "Poetry is in the Streets" does not erase the imaginative drive for creating complex narrative poems that modulate space and time, utilize unusual or surreal images, hyperbolic and ecstatic metaphors with the purpose in essence being to create and perform highly rhythmic lyrical-narrative poems capable of carrying a variety of the tones of emotional expression.

Here the leaps and associations from Mazak's death to his childhood, to scenes of his surviving daughters and sister, to the speaker's reflections and fantasies musically build-up to an emotionally intricate closure.

Robbins has also created a substantial body of poems exploring the conflicts and celebrating the ecstasy and emotional complexity of married life, including the unique bond between parent and child.

And So Have I", "Marc Chagall and the Male Soul", "I Went Through a Box of Emily's Shell Jewelry", "The Eighties"; and from current published poems: "Pulled Over", "The Fire Petal", "The Weaving", "The Sexiest Part", "My Boat, My Waves", and "Badlands and Outlands".

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.

Many poets confronting the limitations of lineation in poetry, while desiring a wider subject matter and freedom in the approach to style, have turned to the prose poem.

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.

Press, 1996) Short Fiction Criticism Doren Robbins has published critical essays and articles on Kenneth Rexroth, George Oppen, Phillip Levine, Deborah Eisenberg, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Charles Bukowski, Thomas McGrath, Larry Levis, Bob Dylan, Carol Tinker, Katerina Gogou, Ellen Bass and Kazuko Shiraishi among others in The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, The Daily Iowan, Third Rail, Onthebus, Caliban and others.