[1] He worked as salesman, bookkeeper and labourer before graduating from the Workers' and Farmers' College (Arbeiter- und Bauern-Fakultät) of Leipzig in 1960, and then completed a teaching degree in German and Russian in 1964.
At the same time he worked on a freelance basis for the compilers of the Dictionary of the Upper Saxon Dialects, providing them with more than a thousand words from his own household.
To further his career as a poet, in the years 1969 and 1970 Kirsten spent nine months studying at the Johannes R. Becher Institute of Literature, under the tutelage of Heinz Czechowski and Georg Maurer.
Much of the poetry is collected in die erde bei Meißen (1986), which received the Peter Huchel Prize in 1987, and helped introduce him to West German audiences.
During the upheavals of 1989 and 1990, Kirsten became involved in the New Forum at Weimar, but he was quickly disillusioned and retired from political activism.