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Membership : A Letter From the Director

Dear Friend,

I am writing to encourage you to make a donation to the Poetry Center.

It’s a good time to consider writing a generous check in our name. This year in particular, we are focusing in earnest on our remarkable American Poetry Archives collection. Throughout the coming year (and foreseeable future), with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, we will be cataloging the oldest audiotapes in our collection. These reach back to the Poetry Center’s founding in 1954, and it’s remarkable that in over 50 years no one has notated and cataloged exactly what is recorded there. The ultimate goal of the Archives project is to create digital masters of every audio recording, with detailed catalog information, and to make the recordings publicly accessible through online access.

It’s a laudable ambition, and the fact of the matter is that all this work must be done in real time: transfer from fragile open-reel tapes, sometimes damaged by age, to a digital format takes time more than equivalent to the actual recording time; listening attentively and notating the contents of each tape takes longer; and enabling online access, the ultimate step in making available what has been largely sitting unused in our vaults, will involve still another process.

Each hour of tape, and we have something like 3,000 hours of original poetry recordings on-hand to consider, requires several hours for Archives Staff and student interns. Time, plus software, plus up-to-date equipment, from functioning reel-to-reel playback components to portable hard-drives for long-range digital storage, results in a project that must seek outside funding. Individual donors are a key component in this process, as you are among our constituency who value the fact we’ve recorded and preserved every reading the Poetry Center’s hosted in the past 53 years.

Our goal is to raise $10,000 from individuals this year to contribute to the Poetry Center’s Archives project: $10,000 which will supplement the NEA project grant to us of $15,000 for 2006-07. These are relatively small amounts of money, if we’re considering a long-range project that will take several years to complete. Though it’s my sense that this is very much a realistic objective, and that you and plenty of others will benefit directly from the project in coming years.

If you do value the work that the Poetry Center does, please consider a generous donation. Young poets and students born in the late 1980s can listen already to some of the earliest recorded voices in our Archives vault: Robert Duncan or John Wieners in 1959, Langston Hughes or Denise Levertov in 1958, William Carlos Williams 1955, Marianne Moore 1957, Robert Creeley 1956…. I need to remember, too, that every one of our current programs is being recorded, cataloged, and archived so it will be available for listeners 50 years from today. That’s something real.

Your donation should be mailed to: The Poetry Center, SFSU, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco CA 94132. THANK YOU!