The Grand Piano

About the project

THE GRAND PIANO is an experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language poetry in San Francisco. The project takes its name from a coffeehouse at 1607 Haight Street in San Francisco where from 1976 to 1979 several of us programmed and coordinated – and all of us participated in – a weekly reading and performance series.

Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten write THE GRAND PIANO. Alan Bernheimer, the eleventh pianist, takes the lead in organizing documentation for the books and this website.

How we work

THE GRAND PIANO is centered on the 1970s when we first met and collaborated. Yet we all engage issues beyond that time, and the project adheres to no prescribed set of themes.

Originally, each author was to follow the prompt of the previous. In the event, many sections have been written out of order, and the project's development has been nonlinear even as it is being published in serial form.

By the time we began to discuss the project in 1998, many of us had left the Bay Area. Tom suggested we work in a collaborative online space developed by a company he had founded. Ron suggested that we call our online space "The Grand Piano," after the reading series that had been so important to the growth of our community. As we planned the structure, Barrett began to refer to its structure as "Mode A," and the name remains active in the publishing imprint for the books. When Tom's company disappeared in the dotcom collapse, we continued the project via a listserv.

New volumes of THE GRAND PIANO appear several times a year. The complete series will comprise ten volumes, with the ten authors appearing in different sequence in each volume, according to the following grid:

1 BP BW SB CH TM RS KR LH RA TP
2 BW TP RA SB KR TM RS CH LH BP
3 SB TM CH RA LH BP BW TP KR RS
4 CH KR TM BW RA TP LH BP RS SB
5 TM RS BW TP SB RA BP KR CH LH
6 RS SB BP KR BW LH CH RA TP TM
7 KR CH LH RS BP BW TP TM SB RA
8 LH RA RS BP TP KR TM SB BW CH
9 RA LH TP TM RS CH SB BW BP KR
10 TP BP KR LH CH SB RA RS TM BW

While we are all equal authors of the project, credit is due to Lyn for handling subscriptions, Tom for this website, Alan for organizing documentation, and Barrett for design and publication of the printed volumes.