The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography. Mode A, an imprint of This Press, 2006.
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 is a collaborative autobiography by ten poets. Centered on the rise of Language poetry in San Francisco in the second half of the 1970s, the project explores a wide range of issues in poetics and the lives of poets — then and now.
The Grand Piano was written over a decade of close collaboration by Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. An eleventh pianist, Alan Bernheimer, took the lead in organizing project documentation.
Of course the authors were not the sole creators of what came to be called Language Poetry. Many other Bay Area poets might have taken part in The Grand Piano, and the authors' contemporaries in New York, Washington DC, and other places where new poetry emerged in the 1970s also might have undertaken a collaborative project of this scale. Perhaps some still will.
If so, however, the work will demand a substantial commitment of energy and to one another. The Grand Piano's authors worked together via a listserv whose archive contains tens of thousands of emails that document the depth and intensity of collective effort this project entailed.
The Grand Piano takes its name from a legendary San Francisco coffeehouse where the project's authors programmed, coordinated and participated in a reading and performance series from 1976 to 1979.
Authors
Rae Armantrout – Rae ran the Grand Piano reading series with Ted from September through December 1977. During the Grand Piano period she published her first first books, Extremities (The Figures, 1978) and The Invention of Hunger (Tuumba Press, 1979); she also published poems in Tottel's, This, Hills, Big Deal, Caterpillar, and many other magazines. Rae is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at UC San Diego. Her recent book Versed (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry as well as being nominated for the the National Book Award. Her next collection, Money Shot, is forthcoming from Wesleyan in June 2011. More information about Rae can be found on wikipedia.Steve Benson – Steve and Carla organized the Grand Piano reading series from February 1978 until February 1979. During the period 1975-1980, he published his first book, As Is (The Figures, 1978), a recorded cassette, On his Own (Widemouth Tapes, 1980), and two small self-published chapbooks, X words (1977) and no name crossroads (1978), as well as poems and other texts in small press magazines. He gave three public talks in Bob's Talks series: "Views of Communist China" (1977), "Careers in the Arts" (1978), and "Close Reading" (1980). In 1977 he began integrating oral improvisation into many of his poetry readings, as well as in extended performances such as "Blindspots" at 80 Langton in San Francisco (1977) and "Narcissus" at the Washington Project for the Arts in DC (1979). He performed in Frank O'Hara's Try! Try! at the Grand Piano (1979), Carla Harryman's Third Man at Theater Eremos (1980), and Celia and Louis Zukofsky's "A"-24 at the Grand Piano, the University of California at Davis and San Francisco State University (1978). Steve's most recent book is Open Clothes (Atelos, 2005). Since 1996, Steve has lived in Downeast Maine, where he has a private practice as a clinical psychologist and co-parents his two children. More about Steve on wikipedia.
Alan Bernheimer – During the Grand Piano period, Alan's work was published in various magazines as well as in his first book of poetry, Café Isotope (The Figures, 1979). In 1979 and 1980 he hosted and produced "In the American Tree: New Writing by Poets," a radio program on KPFA. He was also very active in San Francisco Poets Theater productions. His "Paris Journal" can be found here; his translation of Valery Larbaud's "The Hamlet of the Bees" is at Whale Cloth Press. Alan's most recent book is The Spoonlight Institute (Adventures in Poetry, 2009). More information about Alan can be found on wikipedia.
Carla Harryman – Carla curated the Grand Piano reading series with Steve from February 1978 until February 1979. Her poetry, performance writing, and prose of the period have been collected in Percentage (1978), Under the Bridge (1979), and Animal Instincts: Prose Plays and Essays (1989). Between 1975 and 1980 she completed her B.A. and an M.A. in Creative Arts Interdisciplinary, co-edited with Stephanie Bernstein two issues of The Los Angeles Review, engaged in interdisciplinary collaborations, and produced, performed in, and wrote performance works and Poets Theater Plays. Performances include Frank O'Hara's Try! Try!, the Zukofskys' "A"-24, and her conceptual play Percentage. Her play Third Man, along with Eileen Corder's Mr. Sister, inaugurated San Francisco Poets Theater. Recent performances experiment with polyvocality and bilingualism and have been presented in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Barrett has documented the Detroit performance of her Mirror Play. Carla's most recent books are Adorno's Noise, a collection of conceptual essays (Essay Press 2008) and The Wide Road, co-authored with Lyn Hejinian (forthcoming Belladonna). She is an Assistant Professor at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. Performing Objects and wikipedia provide more information about Carla.
Lyn Hejinian – Lyn founded Tuumba Press in August 1976, and between then and September 1984 she published 50 handset letterpress chapbooks under its imprint. With Kit she hosted "In the American Tree: New Writing by Poets," a weekly show on KPFA from August through December 1978. In 1978, she performed in the Zukofskys' "A"-24, reading the "Story" line in Bob Perelman's production. With Barrett, she founded Poetics Journal in 1981. Her books A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking (Tuumba Press, 1976), A Mask of Motion (Burning Deck, 1977), Gesualdo (Tuumba Press, 1978), Writing is an Aid to Memory (The Figures, 1978) and My Life (Burning Deck, 1980) appeared during the Grand Piano period. She is Professor of English at University of California, Berkeley. More information about Lyn can be found on wikipedia.
Tom Mandel – Tom and Ron ran the Grand Piano reading series from January to August 1977. His books, EncY (Tuumba Press, 1978), Ready to Go (Ithaca House, 1981), Erat (Burning Deck, 1981), Some Appearances (Jimmy's House of Knowledge, 1987), and Realism (Burning Deck, 1991) collect work of the Grand Piano period. In 1977-8, Tom edited and published six issues of MIAM, a magazine of new writing. He was Director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University in 1978-9. With Kit he curated the Tassajara Bakery Café reading series in 1980. During these years, he worked as a community arts organizer, edited an alternative biweekly of politics & art, wrote for the California Arts Council, and directed advertising for Supercuts. In the years since, Tom has been a pioneering entrepreneur in online collaboration, Web-based communities and social media, founding a number of companies and consulting for organizations around the world. His most recent book is To the Cognoscenti (Atelos, 2007). More information about Tom may be found at his website and on wikipedia.
Ted Pearson – Ted organized the Grand Piano reading series with Rae from September through December 1977. Six of his serial works from the second half of the 1970s — "The Grit" through "Refractions" — are included in Evidence: 1975-1989 (Gaz, 1989). He also contributed several prose pieces to the San Francisco Review of Books, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine, and The Poetry Reading (Momo's, 1980). During the Grand Piano years, he worked as a bus driver, janitor, shipping clerk, and domestic, and taught for the Poetry in the Schools program at the Richmond Branch of the San Francisco Public Library and at Lowell High School. He currently teaches English and Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of Redlands. His most recent book is Encryptions (Singing Horse Press, 2007). More information about Ted can be found on wikipedia.
Bob Perelman – Bob and his wife, Francie Shaw, came to the Bay Area in 1976. He started the Talk Series in 1977; in four years over 40 speakers appeared. During the Grand Piano years, Bob published nos. 4-9 of Hills magazine, including the Talks issue (no. 6/7) and the Plays issue (no. 9), featuring plays produced by San Francisco Poets Theater. A second collection of Talks transcriptions, Writing/Talks, came out from Southern Illinois UP in 1985. The two collections will be reissued as a single volume by Salt Press. In 1978, Bob organized performances of the Zukofskys' "A"-24; he played the piano; Barry, Lyn, Kit, Steve and Carla spoke the vocal parts. Selections from his books of that period, 7 Works (The Figures, 1978) and Primer (This Press, 1981), can be found in Ten to One (Wesleyan, 1999), Bob's selected poems. He discusses the writing of this period, among other subjects, in The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton UP, 1996). Bob's most recent book is Iflife (Roof, 2006). He is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. More information is available at his faculty website and on wikipedia.
Kit Robinson – Kit met Steve and Alan at Yale in the late 1960s. In 1973, he met Barrett in San Francisco. The same year, Steve introduced him to Carla, and he introduced them both to Barrett. Through Barrett, he met Ron, Rae, and Bob. Kit published Streets and Roads (1974), a one-shot magazine where work by these and other poets appeared together for the first time. During these years, his books The Dolch Stanzas (This Press, 1976), Down and Back (The Figures, 1978), and Tribute to Nervous (Tuumba Press, 1980) appeared. With Lyn, he co-produced "In the American Tree: New Writing by Poets," on KPFA in 1978. With Tom he ran the Tassajara Bakery Café reading series in 1980. Kit has published 20 books of poetry to date. Recent books include Determination (Cuneiform, 2010), The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976-2003 (Adventures in Poetry, 2009) and Train I Ride (BookThug, 2009). Kit lives in Berkeley, California, where he works as a freelance writer and plays Cuban tres guitar in the Latin dance band Bahia Son. More information about Kit can be found on wikipedia.
Ron Silliman – Ron curated the Grand Piano reading series with Tom from January to August 1977. During the Grand Piano period, he was variously a lobbyist, editor, creative writing teacher, ethnographer, community organizer and member of the San Francisco Fire Department's Arson Task Force. He co-authored pieces of legislation that changed the penalties for over 3,000 felonies in the state of California and preserved over 10,000 units of low-income housing in San Francisco. He wrote The Age of Huts and Tjanting and began The Alphabet as well as editing Tottel's. With conceptual & visual artist Jill Scott, he curated the Verbal Eyes performance series at The Farm in 1979. In 1980, he started the Tassajara Bakery reading series with Bob and David Schneider of the San Francisco Zen Center. More information about Ron can be found on his blog.
Barrett Watten – Barrett founded the Grand Piano reading series in 1976. He edited and published the periodical This from 1971; during the Grand Piano period, many poets of the emerging Language school were represented in its pages. He also edited This Press, which began with publication of Clark Coolidge's The Maintains in 1974 and published work by Larry Eigner, Ron Silliman, Robert Grenier, Carla Harryman, Ted Greenwald, Kit Robinson, Bruce Andrews, and Alan Davies. His Opera-Works (Big Sky, 1975), Decay (This, 1977), Plasma/Parallels/"X" (Tuumba Press, 1979), and 1-10 (This, 1980) are collected in Frame: 1971-1990 (Sun & Moon, 1997). Martin Richet's French translation of Plasma/Parallèles/"X" has just appeared. Several of his early Talks, given in the San Francisco Talks series and at 80 Langton Street, became the initial chapters of Total Syntax (Southern Illinois University Press, 1985). His most recent books are Bad History (Atelos, 1998), Progress/Under Erasure (Green Integer, 2004), and The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), which won the 2004 René Wellek Prize. He is professor of English at Wayne State University. More information about Barrett can be found at his website and on wikipedia.
The Grand Piano continues to amaze & cast shadows of lyric mortality & recuperation; the thrill is definitely not gone & this project to me is immensely profound & evocative of a very unique moment (gathering further momentum) & I am grateful to all of you for sharing such a rich history. — David Meltzer
I’ve loved all the Grand Pianos in the way I love all autobiographies, where nostalgia and history nuzzle and fuse. Lots of solid poetic information, but I’m guilty of treating each installment as economic porno — a fantasy of the Bay Area and surrounding U.S. before Reagan, tech, the homeless, home prices, and unbridled free markets turned it into the diminished but still beautiful Bohemia I knew, 1986-2006. Folks, we missed the party, but its structure was against us, and there’s tactical comfort in that. — Rodney Koeneke, on GoodReads.
A vital contribution... relevant to any thoughtful analysis of the place of poetry writing and production today. — James Sherry, Jacket 34
This small verbal token seems like a passport, an efficient and elegant key to another world where literary idealism and integrity still command respect. — Maria Damon, Rain Taxi Review of Books
obsessively readable — Mark Scroggins
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
Does the book feel a little like a soap opera?... Aren’t all autobiographies soap operas? ... Am I looking forward to the next installment? Hell yeah! — Nada Gordon
...collective autobiographers ...using the narratives of their history... to nurture an arena of possibilities where ideas can be exchanged. — Rob Fitterman
Links
Burt, Stephen. ode-y et emo (on the Grand Piano 5). Harriet - a blog from the poetry foundation, (28 January 2008).Bushnell, Jeremy P. Review of The Grand Piano 1 and other recent books. raccoon : notes and scavengings, (18 August 2007).
Chirot, David-Baptiste. "Parole in Liberace: the "Grand Piano" & its accessories-necessaries. Site--Sight--Cite ******* Visual--Sonic-- Visceral Poetries (25 July 2007).
_________. More on: "Parole in Liberace: the "Grand Piano" & its accessories-necessaries. Site--Sight--Cite ******* Visual--Sonic-- Visceral Poetries (11 September 2007).
Cressan, Alain. Piano. L'ombre d'une ville, (16 September 2009).
Damon, Maria. Review of The Grand Piano. Rain Taxi 12, no.1 (print edition; Spring 2007).
Damon, Maria. Three Ladies, Three Bodies, Three Poets: A Retro-Neo/phytic Semi-yessay. EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts 4 (2007).
Filreis, Al. "playing The Grand Piano." Al Filreis blog (18 August 2007).
Filreis, Al. "He's plainly and simply thankful for friends." Al Filreis blog (24 November 2007).
Gardner, Drew. "The Grand Piano1." Overlap (15 April 2007).
Gordon, Nada. "Questions that occurred to me on a first reading of The Grand Piano" and other posts. Ululations (March 2007).
Gricevich, Andy. "On the Grand Piano, part 4". Ululations (March 2007).
Marcinkowski, Marc. "On the Grand Piano". Developing Poetics (various dates).
Nicoloff, Michael. "On the Grand Piano". I am yer grammar (December 9, 2006 & January 14, 2007).
Schlesinger, Kyle. "The Grand Piano". Cuneiform Press blog (30 January 2008).
Scroggins, Mark. "The Grand Piano, part 1" and "The Toy Piano." (5 April, 11 April 2007).
Sherry, James. "The Ten-Tone Scale." Jacket 32 (April 2007)
_________. "How Events Really Work." Jacket 32 (April 2007).
_________. "Language Poetry by the Bay." Jacket 34 (October 2007).
_________. "Language Poetry by the Bay." Jacket 35 (Early 2008).
Silliman, Daniel. "Grand Piano and Other Phrases." 20 June 2003.
Silliman, Ron. "All posts on the Grand Piano." Silliman's blog.
Spahr, Juliana. Posts on The Grand Piano. Swoonrocket (March 2007; November-December 2006; November 2004).
Sullivan, Gary. "The Grand Piano, part 1" and other posts. Elsewhere (16 March 2007).
Watten, Barrett. "First Response: The Grand Piano." Posts (November 2006).
_________. "How The Grand Piano is being written" Posts (May 2007).
Young, Stephanie. Post on The Grand Piano, part 2. The Well Nourished Moon (6 March 2007).
Feel free to use this Google search for more current results.
Robin Tremblay-McGaw:
Hive and/or the Dark Body of Friendship: A Response to The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography
The Grand Piano is a fascinating
read and for this reader, it comes at a propitious moment as I, and it
seems to me other people struggle with the notion of community as it
pertains to writers, and perhaps particularly poets. Maybe this
preoccupation with community has a particular inflection among writers
interested in a literature that is socially engaged and experimental or
innovative. It is such a small pond. What is a writing community? Is
there such a thing? How does community differ from friendship. Is the
writing community a nurturing place? Or does it look more like the
global community, rife with competition and disparate investments and
access to capital and power? Maybe it’s really high school all over
again–with the cool kids, the nerds, the druggies, the outsiders. Though
the various factions have different labels, their behaviors may be the
same: someone may speak to you on one occasion, at one reading and not
an another. In less or differently loaded terms, maybe community is the
entire poetic literary enterprise–the collective sum of current and past
writers, texts, literary readings, publications, etc. with which, as a
writer, one is in conversation and argument? Some of these questions
turned up in the blogosphere on K. Silem Mohammad’s blog limetree in September of 2006 as he responded to a post made by Lisa Robertson at the Poetry Foundation web site
in which Lisa ruminated about “how community is a common currency right
now.” She writes: “Certainly I primarily write to my friends and for
them, seeking to please and delight them above all, and sometimes
mysteriously and painfully falling out. But I don’t want to call this
community. I want to preserve the dark body of friendship.” In a
nutshell, Kasey disagreed with Robertson’s favoring of friendship over
community. He asserted that “Friends are a personal, erotic happiness.
Community is a pact that ensures the discrete structure of a hive”
(blog). While Kasey’s construction of friendship and community provides
for some overlap, it suggests bifurcation with desire on the one hand
and utilitarian function, labor, and survival on the other. This way of
constructing the difference is interesting though it seems to me things
are much messier and less clearly delineated. Enter Robertson’s “dark
body of friendship” with its danger and “its corporal erotics, mostly
not institutionalized, not abstracted into an overarching concept and
structure of collective protocols”
(http://poetryfoundation.org/dispatches/journals/2006.06.26.html). The
authors of The Grand Piano grapple, retrospectively, to
understand or construct a poetics of their particular collective, one in
which the personal and the communal are traversed by desire and what
Bob Perelman articulates with some trepidation–love: “I propose that we
consider a basic issue facing writers: love” (Perelman 9). The question
of love is taken up by most of the writers in some fashion or other. The
partial ghosts of this love include, among other things, Robert
Creeley’s book For Love, Victor Shklovsky’s Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, the structure of love as a force for social change in the 1960s and 70s, as well as the gendered constructions of the troubador and the lady as object of that love and the poetry that gets made in its service. So much to unpack here!
As the serviceable brown paper dust cover on the almost pocket-sized paperback volume states, The Grand Piano Part I
is the first of a 10 part series and an, “experiment in collective
autobiography by ten writers identified with Language poetry in San
Francisco.” The Grand Piano takes its name “from a coffeehouse
at 1607 Haight Street, where between 1976 and 1979 the authors variously
organized and took part in a reading and performance series that became
a major venue for many in the literary community to present and hear
new work” (70). At the end of the book, there is a helpful and
impressive chronology of the Grand Piano Reading Series from 1976-1979.
As its very title asserts, this project is one that is at odds with its
own premises and requires a negotiation from aslant, or as Bob Perelman
whose sentence on love begins the volume, writes, “The single sentence
[on love] sits in front of a number of stuttering stops. I want to
counterpose it to the kind of pleasure I used to get, and still do if
truth be told, from veering off from given words and structures” (9).
This veering off has, surprisingly in the context of the book as a
whole, a trajectory that seemingly proposes itself as queer. By this I
mean to use queer not necessarily in its nominative form, as a noun, an
identity, but in its adjectival or verb forms. I use the word
surprisingly above because New Narrative writers such as Robert Glück
and Bruce Boone criticized the Language poetry project from a queer
perspective. Robert Glück writes:
Whole areas of my
experience, especially gay experience, were not admitted to this utopia
[of language writing], partly because the mainstream reflected a
resoundingly coherent image of myself back to me–an image so unjust that
it amounted to a tyranny that I could not turn my back on. We had been
disastrously described by the mainstream–a naming whose most extreme
(though not uncommon) expression was physical violence. Political agency
involved at least a provisionally stable identity....Bruce and I turned
to each other to see if we could come up with a better
representation–not in order to satisfy movement pieties or to be
political, but in order to be. We (eventually we were gay, lesbian and working-class writers) could not let narration go” (“Long Note” 26-27).
For these New Narrative writers, to
eliminate the subject is to eliminate the opportunity to parse
experience’s entanglement with the material, historical and the
ideological. Interestingly, Carla Harryman’s section of the book, “Love,
Discord, Asymmetry” proposes part of the hostility garnered by Language
poetry stems from the fact, “that through ‘language writing’ the male
authority of the poem was actively questioned” (36). The Grand Piano posits
a version of its history as a challenge to normative culture and the
construction of gender and its relationship to literature. However,
eliminating the subject or fragmenting it alone cannot constitute a
queer strategy. While the text produces a polymorphous veering or
straying from a variety of cultural, textual, gender and social norms of
which love is suggestive, this veering gets contained or bound
ultimately in a number of ways; for example, by the connection of love
between parent and child–a connection brought up by several of the male
authors–Perelman, Watten, and Benson. It also gets folded textually into
heterosexual partnerships. But more about that in a moment. 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. It is
also a project that participates in the articulation of its own
accounting for literary posterity. It is simultaneously an accounting
that is too late and too early, though, perhaps as the Stones’ line
goes: time is on [their] side. As Perelman writes, “But at the moment,
it is my guess that love, in writing, does depend on some deep-set
stance turned toward permanence” (11).
The text is at once a collective or group
project and simultaneously an autobiography, a self-written or perhaps,
self-assembled account of a life story, in this case the story of the
collective life, giving precedence to a place–the Grand Piano--a locus
of collaboration and creative meeting and exchange. As outlined at the
end of the volume, each of the ten writers will have an opportunity in
the 10 volume sequence to be the first writer in the sequence.
Therefore, each writer retains his or her particularity as writer while
simultaneously participating in the collective structure of the text;
the author function is problematized and deployed. The text is an
experiment, a testing ground for what such a form might do and how it
might work.
Given the premises articulated by these
various writers in previous writings, such a project, however, is
fraught with complications and challenges. Language poets have a history
of criticizing the naturalized self/individual occupying a central and
preeminent place in American poetry, perhaps now most fundamentally as a
consequence of the Creative Writing industry with its university
creative writing programs, workshops, degrees and institutional
publications, but also as it manifested itself in the New American
Poetry of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. The Grand Piano has
appeared nearly 20 years after the publication of the collectively
authored (by 6 of the 10 Piano authors) “Aesthetic Tendency and the
Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto” published in Social Text in
1988. In this earlier article, situating themselves in an avant-garde
trajectory, the authors are not differentiated. Collectively, they
define their work as effecting a breach in American poetry and address
the “the contradictory response–from enthusiasm and imitation to
dismissal and distortion–to our work” (261). In this essay the writers
address some of the criticisms launched at their work, such as, for
example, the accusation that in their work the individual or self is
under attack. They write: “The individual is seen as under attack, and
this is largely true: the self as the central and final term of creative
practice is being challenged and exploded in our writing in a number of
ways.” (263). The attack on the self is strategic for these writers
because the poetry that results from the focus on the lyrical individual
produces a “kind of worked-over accounting of ‘experience,’ [that] we
think, is primarily responsible for the widespread contemporary
reception of poetry as nice but irrelevant” (264). The various
disruptions investigated and performed by this writing are aimed at
returning poetry to a field of social relevance. The article goes on to
enumerate a number of problems attached to the technology of the self:
“What we mean by the self encompasses many things, but among these is a
narrative persona, the fictive person (even in autobiography) who speaks
in his or her poem about experience raised to a suitably aestheticized
surface” (263). Even though it is not poetry, The Grand Piano inherits
the problematic set forth in this article and one cannot help reading
this text, too, as partially an extended and continued explanation and
defense of the work while it is at the same time a retrospective
meditation on and re-visioning, from the present moment, of its history.
It is an “erotic happiness” (probably intermingled with various
unhappinesses) and the “pact of the hive.” It is a project that is
engaged in constructing its own–if not a narrative–a poetics of the
collective. The Grand Piano, like The New Sentence, The Constructivist Moment, The Language of Inquiry,
and others, continues to establish a discourse of and for Language
poetry and provides a mechanism through which the work of these writers
engages with the world and ensures a place for itself in literary
history and the academy. This is the sort of practice that is strategic
and engaged by many writers seeking a stake in the literary future. The
anthology Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women edited by Mary Margaret Sloan and the journals begun by Kathleen Fraser, (HOW)ever and HOW2, seek to gather, preserve and create a venue for experimental women’s writing; the anthology Biting the Error: Writers on Narrative,
edited by Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy, and Gail Scott,
assembles various writers who worked together to create New Narrative
and then mentored several generations of writers practicing a writing
indebted to New Narrative; and recently, Laura Moriarty in reference to
her own and the work of Norma Cole and others has begun to articulate
another Bay Area Poetics, the A Tonalists
(seehttp://atonalistdoc.blogspot.com/). The Language poets engaged in
this process early in their collaborative writing projects. This kind of
activity, it seems to me, constitutes in part, the “pact of the hive.”
In the individual sections of The Grand Piano the
reader can trace the various strategies employed by each writer as she
or he grapples with the textual negotiation of the self or individual in
relation to the group or collective and the problem of time and
retrospective understanding. Nearly all of the sections employ the first
person though Barrett Watten also makes use of the collective we; others variously address a collective or individual unidentified you.
Kit Robinson’s section is written entirely in the third person while
Ron Silliman makes occasional use of this perspective in the sentence
which follows directly from a paragraph in which he discusses “my
grandparents”: “The person who moved to San Francisco for the second
time in 1972 was a mess” (46). The effect of these writing strategies is
to suggest (as 6 of these writers noted in the Social Text article)
that first and foremost, these writers write for one another and are
engaged in a collective and collaborative project for and with one
another as well as the larger literary field, past, present and future.
The use of the second person in these pieces suggests a hermetic
relation rather than one that is addressed to the general reader.
Secondly, the writing gives form to the struggle and experiment that it
is to write as a Language writer in a genre that while being
reconstituted is also at odds with the project. A number of the writers
attest to the various difficulties with writing their sections. For
example, Carla Harryman writes: “This piece was very difficult for me to
begin” while Bob Perelman writes about his beginning with love: “It was
hard for me to write it there, above, posing it as a term in a
discussion of writing” (29, 9).
There is much to discuss about this
engaging book, but I want to return to the question of love, and
particularly to my assertion that it is presented and in some cases,
ultimately contained as a queer force subtending and traversing
relations. This move is a surprising one in some respects, and perhaps
one that can only be made retrospectively. For example, in discussing
the group performance at the Grand Piano of Zukofsky’s “A,” Watten
writes, “And we were in love. Note that the concept of “we” here has
perceptibly changed. Suspicious of each other, we entered into the
binding constraints of a publicly authorized performance...” (14). The
next paragraph continues: “We were married by Zukofsky, in the State of
Modernist Apotheosis, County of Temporal Crisis” (15). Here, Watten
seems to suggest that it is the members of the group–Lyn, C, Steve, Kit,
Bob–who are married to one another and to a kind of knowledge of
Zukofsky’s text and language via the performance of “A.” Watten’s next
sentence, “Later, in temporal fact and legal fiction, as it happened, we
were married in the State of California, County of Alameda,” suggests
that those being married are Watten and C, who is “revealed” as it were
at the end for those who might not know as Carla Harryman: “But in the
real world, where love is true affection, C–stands for Carla”
(23). This is one location in the book where its imagined readership
includes those outside of its producers. Watten interrupts his own text
just prior to this revelation to discuss its staging: “(A lady asks me,
why the object of love in this writing is not named. It is because,
where love is authoritarian will, the construction of its object can
only be ideology. Milton’s
Eve is a construction, an important one for his literary authority and
the perverse utopia it names” (22-23). Here and earlier in the text,
Watten discusses differing conceptions, problems and ideologies around
love, some of which he articulates as the problem of love and
authoritarian will (“Love became the hitting end of a big stick, the
final authority by which all difference, particularity, and belatedness
would be put down forever” 20), alluding and promising to “write
brilliantly on” the controversial evening in 1978 in San Francisco when
Watten presented a reading of Zukofsky’s “A” in the middle of which
Robert Duncan contested Watten’s reading of Zukofksy’s rewriting of
Catullus1.
Here, though it is absent from the text, the question of love,
sexuality, poetry and experience become complex and intermingle
particularly since undergirding this debate is the question of sexuality
and homosocial/sexual desire in the context of experience, poetics and
reading/interpretation. (See Watten’s web site where he discusses this)2
Interestingly, Watten’s text is followed by
Steve Benson’s in which he details the writing of his section during
his “last few days of my paternity leave from full-time work in a
non-profit mental health clinic” (23). Benson’s piece is staged from the
perspective of the present as are many of the pieces. However, it is
interesting that he begins his writing from a locus of a heterosexual
partnership and from the perspective of a father. The writer introduces
the personal life of the author, and thus invites the reader to consider
this personal life, this penumbra or shadow of the author function.
This strategy is itself queer because it elides Benson’s own personal
sexual history. For example, Benson writes: “I had identified myself as
gay since 1976, but I found my orientation changing unexpectedly and
dramatically in 1992" (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~wh/visitors/bensonbio.html).
The same biographical piece notes that “Carla Harryman, an
undergraduate writing student who often came to graduate fiction-writing
workshops, became my best friend and partner.” We might argue that
Benson’s personal sexual history is his own and indeed it is. Yet,
somehow, in the context of this particular text which ostensibly covers
the years 1975-1980, and its specific investigation of the trope and
structuring effects of love and implicitly, sexuality, and given the
kinds of containment that this reader sees happening in various places,
it is curious and anomalous that Benson’s section veers away from the
queer, aiming his writing from a place of heter-normativity. Ron
Silliman’s piece uses the trope of sexuality to set up differences
between “friendships in the political world” which “must be the
friendship equivalent of anonymous sex” with the “relations of poetry”
which “were and are for me the polar opposite of those grounded in the
political activity of the American Left” (48-50). The relations of
poetry, for Silliman, are “a model of correspondences (not unlike this
dialog) over a serious expanse of time” (51). So, poetry friendships are
something more and better than anonymous sex and perhaps less than
relations of love. Time and work seem to differentiate the two.
Carla Harryman’s section takes up the Lady
in Watten’s section. She writes: “Even if the heroic storybook tale, the
Provençal poem, or the epic were no longer read, their themes would
linger in abundance” (28-29). Through this framework she examines how
traditional gender relations and the constructions of romanticism
continue to permeate our culture particularly as they are deployed by
the media and government. Such constructions permeate our understanding
and productions of all sorts, including war. Our culture is saturated by
these constructions which exert powerful affects, despite the material
realities of, for example, the existence of women soldiers today or
fathers who “mother” their children. She deftly explores how Robert
Creeley makes use of the figure of the Lady in his poem, “The Door,” and
takes apart that trope and its structuring of gender and the poet.
Harryman writes: “In imagining the poem as one that I have authored, I
see myself split as the person who wrote the poem and as the object of
the poem...The poem does not cohere, if I author it” (31). Yet, despite
the complex problems presented by Creeley’s poem and Harryman’s
criticism of its gender dynamics for the woman as author, she also asks,
“If I love this poem not because of what it said but because of what it
did, what did it do?” (34). One of the answers to that question is that
upon discovering it, “Then and there I was a writer” (37). In the end,
Harryman asserts not only for herself but on behalf of the others, that
“...it almost goes without saying that opposition to the regulation of
gender in literature had everything to do with formal innovation
produced by us, as men and women” (38). This makes sense to me as an
analysis of what’s going on in Harryman’s own work. I’m less clear at
this juncture how this applies to some of the work of the other male
writers. In much of Ron Silliman’s work, for example, despite its New
Sentences, the absence of any stable narrative and the use of the second
person interrogative in a poem such as “Sunset Debris,” the queering of
gender is, in my reading, minimal. However, on some level, Harryman’s
argument here resonates with Jack Hitt’s recent article in Mother Jones about
reactions to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Our feelings about Hillary, as
this article argues, are really about ourselves and the persistent
presence of and agitation against proscribed and insidious gender roles:
the ghost in the machine of culture. Since Language poetry generates
such extreme affective reactions, one must wonder what it is about the
literary community and ourselves that this writing pushes up against? As
Rae Armantrout writes, “Pronouns don’t go away” (62) even if, in some
ultimate staging, the person vanishes.
If Robert Grenier’s “I HATE SPEECH” is seen as an inaugural moment of Language Poetry as it is by Perelman (Marginalization 38), one might argue as Watten does elsewhere3,
that the project of Language poetry is grounded in a moment of
negativity and critique even though it posits the group or collective as
an other significance, one that underscores or exposes the ideology
underlying and propping up the social movement of the “canonical
individual of the ‘expressivist’ tendency” (Social Text 273). In this inaugural, engaging and rich first installment of The Grand Piano,
these ten writers who are “still identified” as opposed to identifying
themselves as Language poets, posit love as an ultimately affirmative
force in their relations over time. Lyn Hejinian states it directly: “I
saw myself...as having been energetically engaged in affirmation....we
were undertaking it for love” (57). As Ron Silliman writes in closing
his piece: “Not that there have not been difficulties, rough spots,
contradictions–in fact, precisely because there have been these and we
have come through them and continue to do so here” (51). There is an
abundance to linger over in The Grand Piano even as and perhaps
because of the large gaps and contradictions. But this is an ongoing,
serial work and I look forward to reading future installments; maybe
there the matter of the dark body will materialize. -
References
www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/vol_3_no_2/alerts/mcgaw.htmlBenson, Steve. Kelly Writers House: Featured Guest Steve Benson Biography. February 11, 2003.
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~wh/visitors/bensonbio.htmlGlück, Robert. “Long Note on New Narrative.”Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. Ed. Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy, Gail Scott. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2004.Mohammad, K. Silemm. Online Posting. Limetree. September 2006.
http://lime-tree.blogspot.com/Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996: 38.Robertson, Lisa.. Online Posting. Poetry Foundation Web Site:.Dispatches. June 26, 2006.
http://poetryfoundation.org/dispatches/journals/2006.06.26.htmlSilliman, Ron, et al. “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto.” Social Text 19/20 (Autumn 1988):261-275.Watten, Barrett. “Tests Of Zukofsky..” Online Posting #3. September 25, 2004.
http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac_pages/ewatten/
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