Robert Bly, This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood

William V. Davis (Baylor University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1977

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection

Resources

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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 audience for the prose poem, which was quickly to become an important medium in…

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547 words

Citation: Davis, William V.. "This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 November 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8286, accessed 26 April 2024.]

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