After serving in the military during World War II, he attended Black Mountain College.
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.
Finstein died of injuries suffered when his truck crashed during a snowstorm near Tonopah, NV, on his way to San Francisco, in March 1982.
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 Francisco, 1968) Selected Poems (Desert Review Press, Santa Fe, 1980)