Gerrit Lansing was born in Albany, New York, in 1928 and grew up in Northern Ohio. Educated at Harvard and Columbia Universities, he has taught at Bard College. For many years Lansing has lived in Gloucester, Massachusetts--a town celebrated as the focus of a twentieth-century American masterpiece, The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson. (Olson, a major poet, was a close friend of Lansing and cited the younger writer as an influence.) In the early '60s, Lansing edited and published two issues of SET, a literary journal that fused Modernist poetic experiment with occult and spiritual themes and served as a precursor of and influence upon the subsequent counterculture. A deeply respected figure among poets, Lansing has carefully composed over the course of fifty years a body of work that stands as a monumental contribution to American literature as well as an important reflection of the cultural and intellectual ferment of its time.