Influenced by several alternative poetry journals of the period, such as
George Hitchcock's
Kayak,
Clayton Eshleman's
Caterpillar, and
Robert Bly's
The Seventies with its emphases on "wild association", political poetry, and critical
book reviews, Robbins co-founded the literary Journal,
Third Rail (Los Angeles, CA 1975), with fellow poet Uri Hertz. He co-edited until 1980, remaining as a contributing editor until 1982. The avant-garde of the period had at least two specific modernist traditions. One, was the ongoing longer-poem development of a personal-historical, disjunctive, elliptical, interior monologue and collage form like that of
Ezra Pound's
Cantos,
William Carlos Williams's
Paterson,
Louis Zukofsky's
"A", and
Charles Olsen's
The Maximus Poems. 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." Eshleman's
Caterpillar combined both traditions, including that of European and Latin American surrealism. Similar to
George Hitchcock's
Kayak and Eshleman's
Caterpillar, Robert Bly's magazine represented an international modernist faction closely related to
surrealism, but a surrealism driven by emotional and sociological dynamics forcing the poet to invent a new imagery, not always aligned with rational analysis, as compared to a surrealism of "automatic writing" often leaving the reader with an alternate disappointment to that of the game of indeterminacy and abstract expression resulting in the majority of
language poets. To this end Bly emphasized the works of
Georg Trakl,
Federico García Lorca,
César Vallejo and
Pablo Neruda in particular. 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. For Hertz and Robbins, at least up to 1982, it appears the generally mutual focus of
Third Rail was basically connected to the paths
Kayak,
Caterpillar, and
The Seventies were taking. That is, there was a strong interest in continuing the development of an international poetry, generally written in a language Rexroth himself referred to as "the international idiom". From 1975–1982,
Third Rail published works by
Henry Miller,
Walter Lowenfels,
Kenneth Rexroth,
Robert Bly,
Jack Micheline,
Christopher Buckley,
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. The journal also published special sections on political events, such as "Poets on
Chile, Neruda,
Allende" (1976) and "Poets Against Nuclear Power" (1980). Hertz and Robbins conducted interviews with the internationally renowned Japanese poet, Kazuko Shiraishi, and surrealist poet and founder of
Kayak Press, George Hitchcock. 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. In 1994, Robbins was a guest editor for the Japanese-based Literary Journal,
Electric Rexroth. His selection of contemporary poets and prose poets included work by Sharon Doubiago, Linda Janakos, Robert Bly,
Gerald Stern, Philip Levine, Ralph Salisbury,
Ingrid Wendt, Clayton Eshlemen,
Marvin Bell, and Tania Pryputniewicz. Robbins' selections for
Electric Rexroth were informed by a desire to present poems that contested at least two of the crucial criticisms of contemporary narrative
lyrical poetry: one, that imagery had become convenient rather than fresh and emotionally driven; and two, the anecdotal self-consciousness pervading mainstream poetry had resulted in a lack of urgency in speech rhythms, while the effects of sound had become routine to the point of cliché. 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. Two other works Robbins selected for
Electric Rexroth, Robert Bly's "An Open Rose," and "Grandma's Myth" by Linda Drand (aka Linda Janakos), are, respectively, strong representations of prose poetry and the hybrid prose poem-short fiction form Robbins himself would develop in his 2004 book,
Parking Lot Mood Swing: Autobiographical Monologues and Prose Poetry (Cedar Hill Press). ==Themes==