About Richard Robbins
Richard Robbins was raised in California and Montana, taught in Minnesota for many years, and recently moved back west to Oregon. He studied with Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees at the University of Montana, where he completed his MFA. He has published seven books of poems, most recently The Oratory of All Souls, which Lynx House Press released in 2023. He has received awards from The Loft, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Oregon Poetry Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America. From 1986-2014, Robbins directed the Good Thunder Reading Series at Minnesota State University Mankato, where he recently retired from the creative writing program.
Website: https://www.richardrobbinspoems.com
Facebook: richard.robbins.39904
BlueSky: @rrobbins19.bsky.social
Instagram: robbins7616
A Profile of the Author
Notes on “Looking for the Man in Another Country”
I have been written several poems with “Looking for the Man . . .” in the title; several of the earlier ones were included in my latest book from Lynx House Press. The poems are often, but not always, list-like pieces that look for men—sometimes known to the speaker, sometimes not—in ordinary situations doing ordinary things. “Looking for the Man in Another Country” assumes some amount of disorientation on the part of the speaker, and so the poem tries to arrange things the traveler observes that might also seem strange or new: a woman at the gate to the underworld, soccer celebrations in an ancient cemetery. The payoff of the poem, for me, is that the strange is brought back home in the speaker’s consideration of himself.
Naturally, the turn the poem took at the end was a surprise to me. But then many of the poems in this series have offered up such surprises. It’s as if the repetitive elements of the list poem—repeated structure and phrasing—create the tension in the poem that allows for disruption of development or view.
Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.
I like all kinds of music, but my go-to when I am cooking will be a jazz LP by someone like Charles Lloyd or Abbey Lincoln. There are a few operas I like, so these I play loud. There are The Dead and Hank Williams. And The Byrds. And Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. And so on. I make bread during some of these listening sessions, with a starter I developed in the first year of my marriage 45 years ago. I’ve attached a picture of a batch.
As for marathons, I believe I have one more in me, which would make #23, but I need to work more on that. My second marathon, by the way, was the Spokane Marathon in 2020. I was in town for my book launch with Eastern Washington University Press and had planned to run the marathon the day before. I was doing really well until the 13.1-mile mark, a bridge across the Spokane River out in the boondocks that would turn us around and head us back to town. That’s when I bonked. It was uncanny, as if the bridge caused it. The rest of the race was tough.
A recent project has been getting our rescue dog to trust the world. It took a while, but she knows now we will not abandon her, and we will feed her regularly and otherwise indulge her with treats but draw the line at letting her on the couch. Now it’s on to other dogs and most people. She’s a work in progress. Also a sweet being.
