Ethnic and working-class themes are embodied in the characters and narrators in Doren Robbins' poems. Most of these characters are family members or friends Robbins worked with when he was pantry man, broiler chef, deliveryman, book store clerk, or carpenter. Whether they be family members that escaped pogroms in Ukraine, deserted the Russian Revolution, survived WWI, WWII, the American-Korean War, or contemporary veterans and immigrants that returned from the American-Vietnam War or the violent conflicts in Latin America, many of these characters are survivors of the ongoing industry of international civilized violence. The storytellers that passed on the historical experience of persecution, exploitation, rape, and murder are legendary characters in the sense that they had the will and the luck to emigrate and survive. Some of these characters appear in the poems "Before and After Tampico", "Four Family", and "My Pico Boulevard". The later poem literally emphasizes and politicizes the French poet Blaise Cendrars' declaration and manifesto, "Poetry is in the Streets" ("Le Poesy es en la rue"), while extending his claim to the notion that the poetry emerging from these streets is historical and demands a radical disclosure and expression regarding the ideologies of power and censorship underlying and undermining the subject. These and several other of his poems are a compassionate and bitter witnessing of injustice and attest to a realism with ethical concerns stretching back to the Jewish Prophets of the First Testament. One of his more noted poems, "For Neruda", his elegy to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, commemorates the life and work of Neruda as one to be celebrated for his compassion, dissidence, and rage, not only for his remarkable love poems, or for his allegiance to Joseph Stalin.