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Steven S. "Kush" Kushner / Cloud House Poetry Archives

The Cloud House Poetry Archives (created by Steven S. "Kush" Kushner) 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 gangs of Kosmos.









Contact us via: beginsberg@gmail.com



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

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

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Read the full text of Simone White's speech "Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics, with Divya Victor." [via XPoetics]



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

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Read the full text of Divya Victor's speech "Cicadas in the Mouth." [via XPoetics]



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

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Edited by Coyne and used with her permission.



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

Homage to Etel Adnan Co-sponsored with The Poetry Center and Small Press Traffic, a book party with contributors to the Post-Apollo Press anthology Homage to Etel Adnan, edited by Steve Dickison, Lindsey Boldt and Samantha Giles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Day of Poetry: To Celebrate Robert Kelly's 40 Years at Bard College, Olin Hall, Bard College, November 10, 2001

Filmed and produced by Steven S. "Kush" Kushner (beginsberg@gmail.com).

Part 1a:

Part 1b:

Part 2a:

Parts 2b and 3a:


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