Gerrit Lansing

Poet, editor, and critic Gerrit Lansing was born in Albany, New York, and raised in northern Ohio. He was educated at Harvard University and Columbia University. Lansing used a range of forms in his poetry to explore social, spiritual, and natural engagement with the world.

A friend of poet Charles Olson, Lansing edited SET in the 1960s, a short-lived literary journal that focused on the intersection of Modernist poetics and metaphysics. Lansing’s books of poetry include Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth (2009), Heavenly Tree/Soluble Forest (1995), and the cross-genre collection A February Sheaf (2003). He collaborated with Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese on the art book Turning Leaves of Mind (2002). He has taught at Bard College and lived in Gloucester, Massachusetts until his death in 2018.