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Cloud House Poetry Archives

The Cloud House Poetry Archives is distinguished from any other by the comprehensive depth of its audiovisual collection and the high fidelity of its field recordings. It is a week-by-week, month-by-month, and decade-by-decade living record of the avant-garde practice of poetry in the San Francisco Bay Area. It represents entire communities of poets and affiliated artists that we identify as the “poet genome” of Northern California/Pacific Rim.

If you are looking west, find here a real Kosmos of 10,000 hours of recorded poets/poetry.

The project now before us is to establish in real space the San Francisco POETMUSEUM Research Center, a cultural laboratory and time machine of the recorded expression of San Francisco Bay Area poets from 1948 to the present. It will conduct cultural archaeology and display essential research on the minute particulars and interrelations of the post depression/post war “New American Poetry”. Here the muses will be rediscovered as we explore with original recordings the poetic DNA and breakthroughs of our poet subjects contextualized to their time & place, related to specific locales and habitats through mixed media exhibitions which focus and envelop the senses on the immediacy of poetic experience.

Our mission is to preserve and transmit the “poetic genius” of all the diverse and yet undiscovered San Francisco Bay Area Renaissances.

Our experimental and operational paradigm for this museum is Upper Paleolithic Cave Art, the sites of Chauvet, Lascaux, and Altamira. We are acting on Rimbaud’s May 15, 1871 letter of the Voyant. We welcome young researchers, scholars and poets to participate in our endeavor.

As the actor/writer Peter Coyote said, “for Kush, poets are his Yosemite—the representatives of pure ‘wildness’ of mind, an imperiled geography which he has taken as a personal mission to correct.”

William Blake Breathes Here as we open Golgonooza the eternal city of the imagination where all the artists who ever lived are now alive creating their essential works. Emily Dickinson & Gertrude Stein Breathe Here as we are a real sanctuary for those called to the endless study/perception/exercise of unique poetry. Walt Whitman Breathes Here as we invite you to join our adventure, our gang of Kosmos.

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Cloud House Poetry Archives

Reading from Let's Burn the Flags of All Nations at Woodstock Town Hall, November 10, 2018

Simone White Reading for the Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics, Presented by Small Press Traffic, San Francisco, CA, June 1, 2014

Divya Victor Reading for the Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics, Presented by Small Press Traffic, San Francisco, CA, June 1, 2014

Petah Coyne, Third Annual Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture at Small Press Traffic Timken Hall, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, June 23, 2013

Etel Adnan Homage Reading, December 11, 2012, The Green Arcade Books Ideas Goods

Joan Retallack Reading for The Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics, Presented by Small Press Traffic, San Francisco, May 27, 2011

Leslie Scalapino Production of Flow-Winged Crocodile, Oberlin Dance Collective, San Francisco, CA, December 21, 2010

Charles Bernstein Reading at San Francisco State, May 12, 2010

Bruce Andrews Reading, Small Press Traffic, San Francisco State Poetry Center, March 20, 2010

Leslie Scalapino Final Reading, Small Press Traffic, San Francisco State Poetry Center, March 20, 2010

Robin Blaser in conversation with Robert Hass, UC Berkeley, November 5, 2008

Carolyn Cassady and Son John Guitar at the Beat Museum, San Francisco, December 30, 2006

Jack Hirschman Poet Laureate Inaugural Address, San Francisco Main Public Library, May 4, 2006

John Ashbery Reading as part of the Lunch Poems Series, UC Berkeley, April 8, 2001

Ed Dorn Memorial Tribute, San Francisco, February 17, 2000

John Ashbery reading at the San Francisco Art Institute (organized with Small Press Traffic), introduction by Bill Berkson, January 26, 1998

Larry Eigner: Sacred Materials

Jewish Ground Ceremony, February 6, 1996

Writing Environs, February 6, 1996

Last Public Reading, November 17, 1995

Goya's L.A., New Langton Arts, San Francisco, CA, February 25, 1995

Also of Interest:

Adrienne Rich Reading at San Francisco State, September 9, 2006

Dennis and Barbara Tedlock, Zuni: Sacred Healing Transmission Ethnopoetics from the "Poetics of Healing" symposium, UCSF Poetry Center, December 3, 2009

John Wieners reading in San Francisco, March 25, 1990