Animal Instincts

Literature & Fiction

Harryman, Carla

United States

This Press

Cultural Writing. Poetry. Memoir. THE GRAND PIANO is an ongoing experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language poetry in San Francisco. It takes its name from a coffee house at 1607 Haight Street, where from 1976-79 the authors took part in a reading and performance series. The writing project was undertaken as an online collaboration, first via an interactive website and then through a listserv. THE GRAND PIANO began serial publication in November 2006. New volumes will appear at three-month intervals until the series of ten is complete. The authors of THE GRAND PIANO are Barrett Watten, Ted Pearson, Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Kit Robinson, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian and Bob Perelman.

The Grand Piano: Part 2

Biographies & Memoirs

Watten, Barrett

Armantrout, Rae

Hejinian, Lyn

Silliman, Ron

Others

Arts & Literature

Poetry. Cultural Writing. Memoir. THE GRAND PIANO 3 continues the experiment in collective autobiography begun over email by ten poets identified with Language poetry, who sought to reconnect their writing practicesand to "recall and contextualize events from the period of the late 1970s." When completed, THE GRAND PIANO will comprise ten parts, in each of which the ten authors appear in a different sequence, often responding to prompts and problems arising in the series. In this issue, the order is Steve Benson, Tom Mandel, Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Ted Pearson, Kit Robinson, and Ron Silliman.

The Grand Piano: Part 3

Benson, Steve

Mandel, Tom (et.al)

Cultural Writing. The fourth installment of the Grand Piano "experiment in collective autobiography" includes an extensive chronology of "Selected Readings, Talks, and Events Concurrent with the Grand Piano Series, 1976-80." In the rest of the book, the ten writers continue their reminiscences of that period, often in dialogue with other pieces. Ideas of "everyday life," Debord's understanding of "drift," utopia, and those specific talks, readings and events of Bay Area 1970s Language poetry are just some of the running motifs in this issue, interwoven with wider reflections on what this particular community of poets meant then or means now.

The Grand Piano: Part 4

Cultural Writing. Biography and Memoir. Number five in the ongoing series of collective autobiography, THE GRAND PIANO (PART FIVE) continues to mark the events, movements and intersections among ten contributing 1970's language poets. In this installment, threads and discussions include friendship, disagreement, homosexuality, Zukofsky, and who exactly wrote the line "Instead of ant wort, I saw brat guts." This book marks the half-way point of THE GRAND PIANO project, which will continue into ten volumes, though they are not individually isolated by prescribed themes.

The Grand Piano: Part 5

Cultural Writing. Biography and Memoir. Number six in the ongoing series of collective autobiography, THE GRAND PIANO (PART SIX) continues to mark the events, movements and intersections among ten contributing 1970's Language poets. The series takes its name from a Haight Street coffee shop at which the poets used to read, and is primarily concerned with reconstructing the period when the contributors were at the forefront of radical poetics. "THE GRAND PIANO is itself a veering off and an investigation and a playing or experimenting with the materials of language, history, textuality, and temporality, the personal and political, poetry and community....There is an abundance to linger over in THE GRAND PIANO even as and perhaps because of the large gaps and contradictions"--Robin Tremblay-McGaw. Some of the many topics in part 6 include: poetry and the body, sexual preference, feminism (waves 1 and 2), Pereleman's "Talks" series, Poets Theater, performance, visual art, jazz, and Chicago's Bughouse Square.

The Grand Piano: Part 6

Regional U.S.

Literary Nonfiction. Biography and Memoir. Part Seven in the ongoing series of collective autobiography, THE GRAND PIANO PART SEVEN continues to mark the events, movements and intersections among ten contributing 1970s Language poets. "THE GRAND PIANO is itself a veering off and an investigation and a playing or experimenting with the materials of language, history, textuality, and temporality, the personal and political, poetry and community....There is an abundance to linger over in THE GRAND PIANO even as and perhaps because of the large gaps and contradictions"--Robin Tremblay-McGaw. Part Seven contains a great deal on music (from jazz to the Doors to the Sex Pistols), and touches on a diversity of other topics, including Poets Theater, Stendhal, AIDS, and the origins of the New Sentence. It also features a "Timeline of Book Publications Significant for the Grand Piano, 1965-1985."

The Grand Piano: Part 7

Literary Nonfiction. Biography and Memoir. Part Nine in the ongoing series of collective autobiography, THE GRAND PIANO: PART 9 continues to mark the events, movements and intersections among ten contributing 1970s Language poets. "Like the early avant-gardes, the poets who gathered at THE GRAND PIANO developed not only an exacting and liberating poetics, but also a way of living-in-art. Its chronicle here is many things, among them a deeply human and amusing map to building community through literature in this most unlikely of times"--Cole Swensen.

The Grand Piano: Part 9

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