| In addition to several chapbooks, Doren Robbins has published five previous full-length collections of poetry, including Parking Lot Mood Swing: Autobiographical Monologues and Prose Poetry (Cedar Hills Books, 2004), Driving Face Down (Eastern Washington University Press, 2001), which won the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, and My Piece of the Puzzle (Eastern Washington University Press, 2008). His poems, prose poems, and short fiction have appeared in a vast array of literary magazines and anthologies, among them the American Poetry Review, Kayak, Sulphur, and For Rexroth, and have earned him numerous prizes and awards, including a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts.
Before embarking on a career in teaching, Robbins spent over two decades working as a cook and as a carpenter. His interests extend to art, and he has produced poster-poems to benefit the Salvadoran Medical Relief Fund, poetsagainstthewar.org, and PEN. He is also the cofounder and coeditor of the literary journal Third Rail. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and currently teaches literature and creative writing at Foothill College, in Los Altos, California, where he is director of the Foothill College Writers’ Conference. |
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Somebody asked me,
but I'm not going
to argue about
the topic of the soul,
deduce or repeat
inductive facts
for its evidence.
For me it's what
the Alsatian poet meant
when he wrote of
the "precision of
the indefinable."
And I've risen
in the plain rinse
of that precision
a couple times before,
and before that.
But I don't have any
depth for angels,
not Lawrence's angel
which he thought was
made when a man's soul
blended into
a woman's soul. And not
Rilke's angels—their beauty—
which he believed
was nothing but
the beginning
of a terror
he could just
barely endure.
I think there is
something somewhat
neurotic about
the prestige
and rarity
of angels—so,
I'll stay plain,
even crude,
a turkey buzzard
among herons
and ruby-crowned kinglets.
And I would be cautious
of angels—Constantine the Great,
for instance, contracted leprosy
after dreaming of an angel
pouring water on him. |
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A word from the poet about "Against Angels"
First thing: “the Alsatian poet,” in line 9, alludes to the artist and poet Jean (Hans) Arp. Arp’s sculpture is a blend of organic shapes, corporeal, floral, geologic, spherical, often evoking the human body in feminine forms. The style is referred to as biomorphism, and it is deeply appealing to my eye. His best sculptures have the presence of something erotic and yet indefinable. My nature and my poems are grounded in both realism and fantasy, so I feel a strong connection with the simultaneous hints of unspecified actual realities that Arp conveys in his visual work. I find it attractive to trust the “precision” of unknowable creative forces; it is a condition, not a belief system. The poem is argumentative: I’m defining my inner inclinations toward the “precision of the indefinable.” The speaker is impatient with both D. H. Lawrence and Rainer Maria Rilke for maintaining the myth of “angels” as stand-ins for a type of spiritual or ecstatic condition, solitary for Rilke, at once sacramental and erotic for Lawrence. The closing lines about the emperor Constantine point to the danger of believing in, or even being associated with, abstractions of ideal purity (exemplified by the angel). By stating, “I’ll stay plain, / even crude, / a turkey buzzard / among herons / and ruby-crowned kinglets,” the speaker of the poem is declaring himself a type of personality, one symbolized not by a metaphorically elite creature (like either Rilke’s or Lawrence’s angels) but by a bird that could survive by its wits, with a heightened sense of smell and sight, a bird that is not “pretty” and does not sing but instead makes grunting and hissing sounds. The symbol works for the speaker of the poems throughout the book—a speaker grounded in realism and fantasy, prepared to speak whether the words are “pretty” or not. |
