Max Finstein 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

Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka , formerly known as LeRoi Jones, is an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism...

) and Joel Oppenheimer

Joel Oppenheimer

Joel Lester Oppenheimer was an American poet associated with both the Black Mountain poets and the New York School. He was the first director of the St. Marks Poetry Project...

, among others. He traveled to New Mexico for the first time in the 1950s to visit his long-time friend Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...

, 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

Hippie

The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into San Francisco's...

 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

Black Mountain poets

The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College.-Background:...

 and the poets of the Beat Generation

Beat generation

The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...

. 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)