Itinerant Dreamer

Doren Robbins' new book is an instance of departure into a collage of genres. The book includes eighty-four original art works in a variety of mediums: graphite drawings, watercolor, collage, photomontage, and mixed media. There are several new poems and poem-collages, including the timely political outcry, "Under the world's Leadership there's a lot of shopping carts," which includes sixteen art works poignantly and sometimes satirically exploring homelessness: "Man facing homeless camp," "Shopping cart tossed into LACMA tar pit," "Copulating shopping carts," "Capital homeless" and others. The sixteen works are introduced with an essay, Shopping Cart Globalism, Capital Homeless. Another political section, The Iron Heel Series, also introduced with an essay on the subject matter, and a class-consciousness reflection on scholarly interaction with a student poet, extends the tradition of representing the struggles and tragedies of "the other America" that Jack London explored in his novel. There's a short memoir on discovering the post-World War two German poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, with a sequence of six elegiac graphite drawings dedicated to Celan. Further into the book, there's an introspective monologue with accompanying art works responding to Joseph Beuys' performance art piece, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. The book also features two "Introspection" sections, and two sections sequenced as "Erotic Feelings." Other works uniquely evoking crucial experiences come straight at the viewer-reader: "Rocking horse archetype," "Itinerant dreamer," "Don Quixote and Sancho Panza visit one of the Pleiades," "James Baldwin observes," "Waiting for Godot Mutherfucker," "Gaza, Palestinians, Multiple dates," "Baby Hitler with wet nurse," Hostage Libido," "Muse on Crete." The book is an open-ended unification of introspection and fantasy, eroticism and marriage, political truth and remorse. It enriches discovery and qualifies a dedication to meaning and expression.