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: 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 (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

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 …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

547 words

Citation: Davis, William V.. "This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 November 2001 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8286, accessed 23 November 2024.]

Save this article