When Poetry Was the World

M.G. Stephens is among the least recognized contemporary authors writing in the United States. For over half a century, he has written and published novels, short stories, memoirs, plays and poetry, beginning with the novel Season at Coole (1972), and most recently adding the memoir When Poetry Was the World (2025).

I first encountered him, or he first encountered me, when the Working Theatre produced his Vietnam War-related play Horse. Bill Mitchell, one of the theatre’s founders, was from my home town, and gave Stephens a copy of my memoir Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir. A year or so later, when Stephens organized a major gathering at the West Side YMCA in New York City of writers who had fought in the Vietnam War, he invited me to participate.

I have followed his writing ever since. I included two of his poems, ‘After Asia’ and ‘The Carp’, in Carrying the Darkness: The Poetry of the Vietnam War, and years later published his prose poem ‘After Horse’ in an issue of the Veterans for Peace Newsletter.

This recent memoir – published along with a series of linked stories called Come on, Eileen and a poetry collaboration with the artist Archie Rand titled Popeye, Unchained – is set largely in New York City, and is built around the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. The opening sentence reads, ‘In June 1966, I found my first New York apartment’. The memoir ends in 1969.

Stephens, only a few years older than me, by 1966 was thoroughly committed ...