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Grand PianoEpisode 1: Steve Benson, July 28, 2022Steve Benson: For my live reading for GP TV, I chose to select a passage or two from each of the ten essays I wrote into the Grand Piano books and read them straight, which is to say, with due emphasis and embodiment, articulating myself and my laptop camera in physical relationship, as well as its mic. One continuous shot as if ten. Episode 2: Ted Pearson, September 8, 2022Ted Pearson: It fell to me to write the opening essay of the final volume, "Etude X: Threads," which I chose to read straight through. I wanted to reflect on issues raised in earlier volumes and to project their continuing relevance. As well, I wanted to locate ours as an actively productive "community of practice," a concept I discuss at some length. Episode 3: Rae Armantrout, September 22, 2022Rae Armantrout: I read some new material I wrote in asynchronous conversation with Bob’s #5. We were both trying to situate ourselves in past and present time. Then I read my #10 essay and finished with a new poem called “Finally." Episode 4: Kit Robinson, October 6, 2022Kit Robinson: I talk about The Grand Piano project as an exercise in the superimposition of various time frames and how I’m not that guy. Then I present a collaged set of passages from all ten of my chapters in The Grand Piano. A lively discussion follows. Episode 5: Tom Mandel, October 20, 2022Tom Mandel: Collaborating on The Grand Piano the ten of us exchanged thousands of emails. A recurrent subject in our correspondence was the question of the absent pianists—those poets & other artists with whom we had been & often still were close but who did not figure among the authors of our project. I decided to read passages from my Grand Piano essays that addressed the experience & significance of absence and those absent in a number of ways: my invention of a fictional poet nonetheless a member of our cohort (#10), a trip to New York with Ron to attend a memorial for Emma Bee Bernstein who had died at 23 some weeks earlier (#8), & one of the last visits Beth & I had from our dear friend the filmmaker Warren Sonbert about a year before his death of AIDS (#7). Episode 6: Barrett Watten (Take 2), November 27, 2022Barrett Watten: I divided every section of my entries in The Grand Piano into three areas: beginning, middle, and end; and correlated them with Bruno Latour’s concepts of actor, network, theory. Then I made a matrix as the structure of the reading as an event. Using aleatorical techniques such as a rolling a die, I made a sampling that would distribute the different categories across fifteen sections. In fact, I made thirty samples, but read only half of it—what you hear is matched by what you’re not going to hear, reserved for another time. Episode 7: Carla Harryman, December 4, 2022Carla Harryman: I read one complete essay, "Drift à Deux," the leadoff piece for Grand Piano 4. The theme of everyday life threads through the essay's sequences of two-sentence paragraphs. The idea of pairings motivated my choice to bookend the reading of "Drift à Deux" with excerpts from a recent dialogue poem, "Late to Work" in Cloud Cantata and a collage poem (in GP 10) of a reading of Kathy Acker's and Lorenzo Thomas's that took place at the Ear Inn in 1978. It was a reading of paired sentences, conjoined text, and conversational fantasia in COVID time, followed by an extended conversation on the topic of everyday life. Episode 8: Ron Silliman, December 15, 2022Ron Silliman: I tried to contextualize the environment that greeted us in the 1970s by confronting just how much the Donald M. Allen anthology shaped and misshaped the poetic landscape of the 1960s by contrasting it with Daisy Aldan's counter anthology, A Folder. And went on to discuss how that conditioned my early relations with David Bromige, whose collected books Bob Perelman and I (and Jack Krick) would go on to co-edit. Episode 9: Bob Perelman, December 29, 2022Bob Perelman: I started with the beginning of my GP 6 piece where I’m quoting a grumpy Coleridge passage about how lame poetry can be to Norman Fischer and we, believing in poetry, laugh, a little ruefully. After that snippet I read “China” and “Confession.” I showed the Chinese picture book I’d used to write “China,” which sparked a lot of discussion. I ended with some new poems. Episode 10: Lyn Hejinian, January 13, 2023Lyn Hejinian: I was originally scheduled to appear on one of the first GP TV shows and chose to focus on my contribution to GP 5 because of its recurring evocations of the 1978 performance of “A”–24, which was the first explicitly collaborative project undertaken by participants in the Bay Area Language writing scene (although it could be argued that the Grand Piano reading series was itself a collaborative project and preceded the “A”–24 performance by several years). The “A”–24 performance was a beginning of sorts; much grew out of it (including Poetics Journal). It was a beginning with a future, and when I ended up appearing on the final GPTV show, it was the futurity of the collective (and not yet complete) Language writing project writ large that I wanted to celebrate. Sections of my GP 5 essay with a few interpolations added still seemed appropriate to the occasion. These sound recordings are being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © all respective artists. Used with the permission of the author. Distributed by PennSound. |
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