When Poetry Was The World

M. G. Stephens (Michael Gregory Stephens) is author of over 30 books, including such classic works of fiction-and long out of print-as Season at Coole and The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, both of which novels have had a lot of critical response in book chapters on Stephens' work. Along with Kid Coole those novels comprise The Coole Trilogy. In the last few years, he has published the novels King Ezra (2022), about the poet Ezra Pound, and the third novel in The Coole Trilogy, Kid Coole (2022), a boxing novel about the underbelly of multicultural America. In 2025, Spuyten Duyvil is publishing three new books by M. G. Stephens: his memoir about the Poetry Project's early days, When Poetry Was the World; the linked stories, Come On, Eileen, about Eileen Coole, an Irish poet, who meets, falls in love, and marries the jazz musician and political activist Santiago Santa, and their long exile of 20 years in Algiers, Algeria. Finally, Spuyten Duyvil has brought out a collaboration between Stephens and Brooklyn artist Archie Rand, Popeye, Unchained, 85 unrhymed blank-verse mostly sonnets, about Popeye and Co., along with 85 collages by Rand. In 2021, Stephens published the hybrid work of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, History of Theatre or the Glass of Fashion, about an out of work actor who lands the part of Hamlet. He is also the author of Jesus' Dog, stories, that was published by Paycock Press in 2024. Michael Gregory Stephens lived in London for 15 years, and during that time, from 2003 to 2006, he researched and wrote a doctorate at the University of Essex in Colchester, England, on the origins of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the- Bowery. He was 20 years old when he first showed up at the newly opened Poetry Project in the East Village in 1966. Forty years later, he received his doctorate on those early days in downtown New York. When Poetry Was the World is girded by that research, although it is also a straight up memoir full of stories from the 1960s on the Lower East Side.