Robert Bly's This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977) is a sequence of prose poems: a seemingly self-contradictory form (a poem written in prose paragraphs) which Bly, more than anyone else, had helped to popularize. The book is a kind of sequel to The Morning Glory (1975), Bly's earlier collection of prose poems and it anticipates What Have I Ever Lost by Dying (1992), his collected prose poems. Bly had been experimenting with the from of the prose poem since the beginning of his career and he had attempted to define it both theoretically and in terms of his own practice of the genre. In This Body Bly brought his work in this hybrid genre to climax, and, at the same time, he created a viable audienc

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Published 12 November 2001

Citation: Davis, William V.. "This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood". The Literary Encyclopedia. 12 November 2001.
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