This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood: Prose Poems

by Robert Bly

Very good in illustrated wrappers. First edition - First printing, a trade paperback, issued simultaneously with hardcover. A collection of prose poems, illustrated with drawings by Gendron Jensen. 59 pp.

Genres: Poetry

59 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Robert Bly was an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.
Robert Bly was born in western Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian stock. He enlisted in the Navy in 1944 and spent two years there. After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard and thereby joined the famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, which included Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Harold Brodky, George Plimpton, and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York living, as they say, hand to mouth.
Beginning in 1954, he took two years at the University of Iowa at the Writers Workshop along with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and others. In 1956 he received a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. While there he found not only his relatives but the work of a number of major poets whose force was not present in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl and Harry Martinson. He determined then to start a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States and so begin The Fifties and The Sixties and The Seventies, which introduced many of these poets to the writers of his generation, and published as well essays on American poets and insults to those deserving. During this time he lived on a farm in Minnesota with his wife and children.
In 1966 he co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and led much of the opposition among writers to that war. When he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the Resistance. During the 70s he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 80s he published Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The Wingéd Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau,The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow.
His work Iron John: A Book About Men is an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages. He frequently does workshops for men with James Hillman and others, and workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman. He and his wife Ruth, along with the storyteller Gioia Timpanelli, frequently conduct seminars on European fairy tales. In the early 90s, with James Hillman and Michael Meade, he edited The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, an anthology of poems from the men's work. Since then he has edited The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford, and The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy, a collection of sacred poetry from many cultures.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Bly published this short book of prose poems in 1977, when he was fifty years old, and the poems in it express the turmoil of the later middle years: the sage rises up from within, the lover refuses to die, and the warrior—between love and wisdom—fights on. And for Bly, as always, everything—the mother, the marriage bed, the battlefield, the grave, of all human passion and enlightenment—is experiences within the context of the body.

The books is named after two trees: the camphor, an evergreen known for its healing balm (source of protection, purification, and preservation if the dead) and the gopherwood (the legendary tree of which Noak’s Ark was made). Thus the body contains within itself both death and life, the fear of floods and the promise of the Rainbow Sign.

In addition to Bly’s brief meditations, the book features pencil drawings which self-described “forest eccentric” Gendron has made of individual snail shells. Handsome houses for small bodies, now abandoned, they complement the grace of Bly’s poems.

Here are two (10%) of the book’s twenty prose poems

FINDING THE FATHER

This body offers to carry us for nothing—as the ocean carries logs—so on some days the body wails with its great energy, it smashes up the boulders, lifting small crabs, that flow around the sides. Someone knocks on the door, we do not have time to dress. He wants us to come with him through the blowing and rainy streets, to the dark house. We will go there, the body says, and there find the father whom we have never met, who wandered in a snowstorm the night we were born, who then lost his memory and has lived since longing for his child, whom he saw only once . . . while he worked as a shoemaker, as a cattle herder in Australia, as a restaurant cook who painted at night. When you light the lamp you will see him. He sits there behind the door . . . the eyebrows so heavy, the forehead so light . . . lonely in his whole body, waiting for you.


WE LOVE THIS BODY

My friend, this body is made of energy compacted and whirling. If is the wind that carries the henhouse down the road dancing, and an instant later lifts all four walls apart. It is the horny thumbnail of the retired railway baron, over which his children skate on Sunday, it is the forehead bone that does not rot, the woman priest’s hair still fresh among Shang ritual things. . . .

We love this body as we lover the day we first met the person who led us away from this world, as we love the gift we gave one morning on impulse, in a fraction of a second, that we still see every day, as we love the human face, fresh after lovemaking, more full of joy than a wagonload of hay.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Bly is a national treasure. This beautifully designed volume of prose poems is lush and evocative, subtle and moving. "This body is ready to sing all night, and be entered by whatever wishes to enter the human body singing...."

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

“My friend, this body is food for the thousand dragons of the air, each dragon light as a needle. This body loves us, and carries us home from our hoeing.
It is ancient, and full of the bales of sleep. In its vibrations the sun rolls along under the earth, the spouts over the ocean curl into our stomach.… water revolves, spouts seen by skull eyes at mid-ocean, this body of herbs and gopherwood, this blessing, this lone ridge patrolled by water.... I get up, morning is here. The stars still out; the black winter sky looms over the unborn lambs. The barn is cold before dawn, the gates slow….
This body longs for itself far out at sea, it floats in the black heavens, it is a brilliant being, locked in the prison of human dullness….”
—
“Last night such glad powerful dreams, each tile laid down of luminous glazed clay. ... The dream said that The One Who Sees the Whole does not have the senses, but the longing for the senses. […] The one who thinks does not have feeling, but the longing for feeling-that longing makes the lines of force at the bottom of Joseph's well. In the dream I saw the lumps of dirt that heal the humpbacked, what rolls slowly upward from the water, and prowls around the rocky edges of the desert, keeping the hermit inside his own chest….”
—
“What shall I say of this? I say, praise to the first man who wrote down this joy clearly, for we cannot remain in love with what we cannot name….”

[Janessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book I picked up at Powells late at night during a bout of indecision and fatigue. Glad I choose this one. It was my first book of poems by Robert Bly and surely it wont be my last. It was just what I needed that night. The other poems of his I read online remind me of the tone of some of the poetry by the chinese poets of the late tang dynasty. The natural imagery, lack of ambition, etc...I'm sure it was an influence. But i definitely like that style as I am also a big fan of the late Tang poets and also recently picked up an anthology of that period which i am enjoying immensely.

[Monkey C · Rating 5 out of 5]

collection of prose poems. i couldn't get into this book when i first read it -- it just seemed like a collection of hippie rantings. but as i started getting more into bly's aesthetics about "deep image" this book started to make more and more sense. each poem is a careful study of a single image. the more you read it, the more rewarding each image becomes.

[Robb Todd]

My first Bly and it is hard to escape this first reaction: People might call this "flash fiction" now. I would say that all these labels often do more harm than good. Bly's prose poems, or whatever you want to call them, are solid and get better toward the end. The collection collects upon itself.

[Jennifer B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Both Earthy and Ethereal.