Named Sidney, Corman was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts. He received his B.A. from Tufts University in 1945 and did graduate work at the Universities of Michigan and North Carolina. In 1949 Corman created "This is Poetry" a radio program airing on WMEX in Boston which ran for three years. His next venture was a poetry magazine, Origin which featured and sometimes debuted such poets as Robert Creeley, William Bronk, Denise Levertov, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, and Louis Zukofsky. Corman hit later established Origin Press, publishing some of these same authors as well as his own works. In the late 1950s he moved to Kyoto, Japan where he found work as a private teacher of English and poetry. He married Shizumi Konishi in 1965 and opened C.C.'s, a coffee and dessert shop that also served as a venue for poetry readings. He lived in the States several times over the years, but in 1982 moved permanently to Kyoto where he remained until his death in March 2004. His published works include over 100 books and pamphlets of poetry, translations of French, Italian and Japanese poets, and several volumes of essays.

Lorine Niedecker, 1903-1970, was a twentieth century, Wisconsin, Objectivist poet. She spent most of her early life in rural isolation, only surrounded by the sounds of the river and natural landscapes near her which strongly influenced her poetry. Niedecker is best known as a "poet of place" and wrote specifically about the Rock River and Blackhawk Island near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. From the mid-1940s to 1960 Niedecker did not publish her work due to isolation and the difficulties that caused for getting published. In the 1960s, there was a revival of interest in her work which created friendship between Niedecker and other notable poets like Cid Corman and Basil Bunting. It was this revival that caused Niedecker to go back to writing until her death in 1970 from a cerebral hemorrhage.

Darrin Daniel is poet and publisher of Corman's poetry. He has published collections of his own poetry, such as Harry Smith: Fragments of a Northwest Life, and is also is a contributor to journals and magazines like Rain Taxi Review of Books and Portlandia. Daniel is also the founder of Cityful Press, which has been publishing writers at all career stages since 1991, and he is currently the executive director of Cup of Excellence.