In Not Fade Away, Doren Robbins continues his poetry-prose, introspective-comic hybrid development starting with Parking Lot Mood Swing (2003). The book is not constructed around plot or epiphany. Themes, digressions, dream interruptions, anti-epiphanies, surrealist and commonplace images create simultaneous collage and coherence. Mixed media photomontages panel the monologues’ fantasies, dream intrusions, oral poetry, memoir, fantasized memoir, political diatribe and erotic experiences. The poetic prose of Not Fade Away contains a sense of informed impatience with lyric, lyric-narrative poetry, and obscure Modernist and Late Modernist poetry, while extending the liberty of innovative expression inherent in early 20th century American, Russian, French, and Spanish poetry, comedic DaDa, organic Surrealist image, and the full disclosure and social consciousness of Beat poetry, all The Books of Dreams, the sanity of Rabelais, Whitman, and Tolstoy abide.

 Originally from Los Angeles, Doren Robbins’ lives in Santa Cruz, California. After twenty-something years traveling, raising a family, working as a cook and a carpenter, Robbins started teaching a variety of creative writing and literature courses through an extended personal and moral interpretation of Kenneth Burke’s idea of “literature as equipment for living,” incorporating exploitation, sexism and racism as fact, dreaming as found cinema, and fantasy as deliberate reasoning.

 Robbins’ work has appeared in over one hundred-fifty publications, receiving several awards, including book awards for the Blue Lynx Poetry Award 2001 and the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award. 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 during the ongoing Iraq-Afghanistan-American 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, The Indiana Review, and a few other inoffensive organizations and readable periodicals. Since 2001, he has taught critical thinking, literature, and creative writing at Foothill College. Dorenrobbins.wordpress.com

Praise for Not Fade Away:

“While reading Not Fade Away, I find moments of astonishing perceptive breakthroughs that seemingly only poetry, and perhaps these days only Doren Robbins can achieve with this level of adroit stylishness. They lead to numerous epiphanies, many humorous, which are a combination of his reflections on living with integrity while gazing unflinchingly at the brutal world.

Robbins displays the courage of not self-censoring his imaginary leaps that rip the reader’s reality membrane from ear to ear. Beauty is sprinkled throughout, a byproduct of balancing the spontaneous/haphazard and the poet’s painstaking devotion to craft, nurtured over decades.

Recently his collages have been frequently featured in print and online publications, and the ones included on the cover and inside Not Fade Away are also powerful and playful visual statements in harmony with the poems.” - John Solt

“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

Excerpt