Cloud House Poetry Archives

Steven Kushner is organizing this fundraiser.

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Help Save the Cloud House Poetry Archives

The Cloud House Poetry Museum and collection, is the product of 40 years of unremitting effort by Steven “Kush” Kushner, documenting on video-tape the work of nearly every major poet who has performed or written in the West Coast. The collection consists of 10,000 hours of audiovisual recordings, 7500 books including extensive rare and first editions, and 3000 linear feet of art and artifacts of the literary communities of the greater Bay Area from 1930 to 2016. This includes unique works and personal ephemera of Walt Whitman, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal & Carolyn Cassady, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Diane di Prima, Lenore Kandel, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Bob Kaufman, Jack Micheline and many other visionary poets.

The Cloud House has been active in San Francisco for more than 40 years, existing in experimental spaces that have created sanctuaries for poets, their creativity and the communal enjoyment of their work. To this end, Cloud House has staged countless poetry performances, collaborative poetry events and poet’s theatre. Intrinsic to Cloud House is the multimedia exhibition of poetry as well as field-documenting the literary arts communities that constitute all the San Francisco Bay Area avant-gardes.

San Francisco’s current crisis of evictions has put this irreplaceable collection at risk. Kush’s home—the locus and storage site for the collection— has been sold and he must move by Summertime. Good fortune has brought him a free building in New York state close to Bard College which has been offering him some support. The building needs a new roof and a few other repairs to make it a safe site to house this extensive collection of documents. The total for that rebuilding is $200,000. In addition, another $40,000 is required to pack and ship the collection.

We are appealing to the largest possible community to help preserve this vital archive documenting American poetry, the counter-culture, and avant-garde movements of the last sixty years. Won’t you please help us preserve this world literary heritage.