The Grand Piano at Berkeley
with (left to right)
Steve Benson, Carla Harryman,
Kit Robinson, Rae Armantrout,
Barrett Watten, Tom Mandel,
Lyn Hejinian & Ted Pearson
(intro by Jasper Bernes)

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Tomorrow

The Grand Piano: A Collective Autobiography

Saturday, April 16
2:00 pm
Poets House
New York City

with
Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel,
Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson,
Ron Silliman & Barrett Watten
Moderated by Catherine Taylor

$10, $7 for students and seniors,
free to Poets House Members

10 River Terrace | New York, NY 10282 | (212) 431-7920

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“The Grand Piano continues to amaze...” – David Meltzer

“...language, history, textuality, and temporality”
– Robin Tremblay-McGaw

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The Grand Piano is an experiment in collective autobiography.

Order all ten volumes, individual copies or a partial set.

§

“…obsessively readable”– Mark Scroggins

“Une expérience vraiment captivante...” – Alain Cressan

David Bromige reading in Seattle, May 2003

Today is David Bromige’s 76^th birthday & it will be the first time in many a decade that I won’t have the opportunity to call or at least email him to wish him well. David’s baritone has long been a touchstone for me, one of those familiars that immediately bring comfort, no doubt because I associate it with love & wit. Thanks to PennSound, I can revisit that voice whenever I need to, as no doubt I will today. The latest addition there, I think, is a talk David gave in Bob Perelman’s talk series in 1977 on “Poetry and Intention.”

Last Friday, I traveled to Manhattan to participate in a memorial service for David at Poets House, now ensconced into its Battery Park City home with something akin to a 70-year lease – the venerable organization has room to grow, but also happens to be in the one place on the island that actually is hard to get to without walking several windy rainy blocks along the Hudson River. Joel Lewis, the bard of Hoboken, joked that it was easier to get to from New Jersey.

The following roster will give you some idea who spoke & what they read. Stephen Motika, who’s just finished working on a Collected Poems for Leland Hickman, was the organizer & moderator.

Kathleen Fraser: taped remembrance of David

Ron Silliman:"First" and "The Final Mission" from The Ends of the Earth

Nicholas Piombino: "Soul Mates" and "The End of The Stranger" from Desire

Gary Sullivan:  first two pages of the piece My Poetry

Bob Perelman: from My Poetry

Geoffrey Young: from My Poetry

Charles Bernstein: "My Daddy's at His Office Now" from "American Testament 4"

Laura Sims for Rachel Levitsky: comments and poem (I forgot to note which)

Corina Copp reading from "Joy Cone" from Hills 9 (1983)

Taking Amtrak’s Keystone Special up that afternoon, I’d thought this would be a terrific, joyous event, with no sense of sadness at David’s passing. The work is just so damn great & I’d never had the opportunity to read these two special poems in public before, almost as tho they were my own. But the instant I started to talk, I could hear my voice break – just a little – so I cut my palaver short & dove directly into the joy of the work.

Because we were asked to keep our remarks generally to 7 minutes each (to keep the reading to a reasonable [by NY standards] time – even with nine readers, it ran to 90 minutes – neither Bob Perelman or I were able to read our sections from the forthcoming 9^th volume of The Grand Piano, both of which deal with David. It was interesting – and proves a long-held hunch of mine (or at least is evidence for same) – that My Poetry was the work most often cited here. It is, as I note in my piece for the Piano, David’s iconic book, even though it appeared only in an edition of 650 copies and was never reprinted. Geoff Young, who published My Poetry, conceded that he too has just one copy of this great book.

For my reading,I turned to earlier work – the premise of the order that night (at least after Kathy Fraser) was by the chronology of David’s writing – two poems that I heard David read on the night that I first met him in 1968. But since I didn’t get to read it at Poets House, here is my section from the next Grand Piano, which should be out in a week or two.

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Furthest Up the Trail

SOMETIME AROUND late 1967, a then recent graduate of Bard, David Perry, arrived in San Francisco State’s creative writing program & he & I quickly discovered that we shared an enthusiasm for the work of Robert Kelly & the many poets Kelly had been teaching, basically The New American Poetry. David also knew all the recent Bard College grads who either lived in the Bay Area (John Gorham, Harvey Bialy) or were visiting (Tom Meyer, still then a teenager I believe). One day very early in ’68, David convinced me that we had to go to the Albany Public Library to hear Bialy read. It was the very place where I’d first discovered poetry some six years earlier, but I hadn’t set foot in that building on Solano since I’d left home, so for me the reading was already laden with symbolic power before Paul Mariah, who curated the series there, introduced the readers. Bialy was fine, maybe a little quieter than I’d expected, but it was the poet reading with him, somebody I’d never heard of before, who blew me away. David Bromige was tall with a long face, a resonant baritone, a mastery of syntax that I had not found anywhere, even in the work of Robert Duncan, & a ready, almost twinkly wit that gave me the impression that had Charles Dickens been alive and a New American poet, he would have been very much like this fellow. It was a stunning, eye-opening performance & I vowed to get to know this poet.1

At thirty-five, Bromige was a grad student at Berkeley, writing a dissertation on the Black Mountain poets, far more widely read than I & just a little suspicious of the motives of twenty-one-year-olds. He lived in a cottage apartment with his then-wife, fiction writer Sherril Jaffe, just north of the campus, not far from Josephine Miles’s place & a short walk to Serendipity Books, which in those days encompassed not only the rare books business it is today, but a bookstore & the distribution operations that subsequently evolved into SPD. I would meet David at his place or at Serendipity, or we would walk over to a beer & pizza den on Shattuck just off University & have long discussions, part gossip, part theory.

Our positions in those days were not at all equivalent. Having already had poems accepted by Poetry, TriQuarterly, Chicago Review & the like, I was full of myself, hyperconscious of my status as a “published poet,” which was somewhat unusual among undergraduates even at San Francisco State. But I was also painfully aware of just how hollow all of that truly was & appalled—daily!—at how little I knew & how much I had yet to learn. Not that I would have admitted that to anyone, least of all myself. Compared with David Bromige, I was an absolute beginner.

As the 60s gave way to the next decade, the grand pooh-bah of poetry in the Bay Area was manifestly Robert Duncan, who was only too happy to remind you of this himself. Of all the poets around him, David was by far the most accomplished, most published, most widely read. David already had four books: The Gathering, The Ends of the Earth, The Quivering Roadway & Please, Like Me. Two of these volumes were from Black Sparrow Press, a “big” small press publisher that aimed to be more to be like New Directions or City Lights than, say, White Rabbit or Oyez.

To read more, pick up the 9^th volume of the Grand Piano.

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1. Nor did this prove to be my only important discovery that evening. Hitchhiking back to my apartment by Lake Merrit in Oakland, I caught a ride with someone who recognized me from the reading—David Melnick. Forty-one years later, I’m actively involved in editing the collected works of both Davids.

The eighth volume
of
The Grand Piano
is now available from
SPD

THE GRAND PIANO, PART 4
is now available!

An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980, by Carla Harryman, Kit Robinson, Tom Mandel, Barrett Watten, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman & Steve Benson.

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 is an on-going experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language Poetry in San Francisco. It takes its name from a coffeehouse 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 web site and later through a listserv. When completed, The Grand Piano will comprise ten volumes, with the authors appearing in different sequence in each volume.

New volumes are scheduled to appear at three-month intervals.

     

The Grand Piano
website
is live!

The third volume
of
The Grand Piano

is now available from
SPD

THE GRAND PIANO, PART 2

An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980, by Barrett Watten, Ted Pearson, Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Kit Robinson, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, and Bob Perelman.

Since the 1970s no literary group has made a more articulate contribution to thinking and practicing its groupness than the Language writers. Rejecting the vertical organization of the Poundian or Bretonian circle – with its singular genius issuing directives from its center –­ they instead developed a horizontal structure in which new terms, tones, and intertexts (and new versions of the group's history itself) can emerge from, and be engaged by, any member.

— Lytle Shaw

THE GRAND PIANO is an on-going experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language Poetry in San Francisco. It takes its name from a coffeehouse 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 web site and later through a listserv. When completed, THE GRAND PIANO will comprise ten parts, in each of which the ten authors will appear in a difference sequence.

Parts 1 and 2 are $12.95 each or $20.00 for both. Serial publication began in November 2006; subsequent volumes to appear at three-month intervals. Subscription to the entire series of ten volumes is now available for $90 directly from Lyn Hejinian, 2639 Russell Street, Berkeley, CA 94705. Order forms can be printed in color or black and white.

Designed and published by Barrett Watten, Mode A/This Press (Detroit), 6885 Cathedral Drive, Bloomfield Twp., MI 48301. Distributed (individual orders and trade) by Small Press Distribution, Inc., 1341 Seventh Street, Berkeley, CA 94710-1408. ISBN 978-0-9790198-0-7 (part 1, 80 pp.), 978-0-9790198-1-4 (part 2, 96 pp.), wrappers.

Publication announcement and subscription offer!

THE GRAND PIANO
An Experiment in Collective Autobiography
San Francisco, 1975-1980

by Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Ted Pearson

THE GRAND PIANO is an on-going experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language Poetry in San Francisco. It takes its name from a coffeehouse 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 web site and later through a listserv. When completed, THE GRAND PIANO will comprise ten parts, in each of which the ten authors will appear in a difference sequence.

Like the early avant-gardes, the people 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

Part 1 is scheduled to appear November 2006, with subsequent volumes to be published at three-month intervals. Subscription to the entire series of ten volumes is now available for $90 (individual volumes for $12.95  each) directly from Lyn Hejinian, 2639 Russell Street, Berkeley, CA 94705.  For subscription order form:

http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac%5Fpages/ewatten/pdfs/gporder.pdf (color)
http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac%5Fpages/ewatten/pdfs/gporderbw.pdf (black and white)

Designed and published by Barrett Watten, Mode A/This Press (Detroit), 6885 Cathedral Drive, Bloomfield Twp., MI 48301. Distributed (individual orders and trade) by Small Press Distribution, Inc., 1341 Seventh Street, Berkeley, CA 94710- 1408. ISBN 978-0-9790198-0-X (part 1), 80 pp., wrappers.