Max Finstein

Max Finstein (1924-1982) was an American poet.

Finstein was born in Boston, MA. After serving in the military during World War II, he spent time in New York and San Francisco, becoming friends with poets Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Joel Oppenheimer, among others. He traveled to New Mexico for the first time in the 1950s to visit his long-time friend Robert Creeley, and moved there not long after. He lived in Toas and Santa Fe, NM, on and off for the rest of his life.

In 1967 Finstein co-founded New Buffalo, a hippie commune in Taos. He left New Buffalo in 1969 to found a second commune, the Reality Construction Company.

Finstein died of injuries suffered when his truck crashed during a snowstorm near Tonopa, NV, on his way to San Francisco, in March 1982.

Finstein’s poetry, much of it inspired by the landscape of the American Southwest, is spare and lively, influenced by both the Black Mountain poets and the poets of the Beat Generation. The “Max,” a trophy presented annually from 1982 to 2002 to winners of the Taos Poetry Circus World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout, was named in his honor.

Works

Savonarola's Tune (Laurence Hellenberg, New York, 1959)
The Disappearance of Mountains: Poems 1960-63 (Wild Dog Books, San Francisco, 1966)
There's Always a Moon in America (Cranium Press, San Franciso, 1968)
Selected Poems (Desert Review Press, Santa Fe, 1980)

References

El Palacio