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 Hitchcok’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.
