A scripted, multivocal performance based on excerpts from the ten-volume The Grand Piano will be delivered by eight of the project’s authors: Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Kit Robinson, and Barrett Watten at UC Berkeley and Small Press Traffic, San Francisco. At Berkeley, the event will be moderated by Jasper Bernes; in San Francisco, it will be preceded by a 45-minute group discussion including the audience, moderated by David Buuck, on the values of collective art practice from the 70s to the present.
Holloway Reading Series
Maude Fife Room, Wheeler Hall
University of California, Berkeley
6:30–8:00, Friday, November 18
- Information here
Timkin Hall, California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco
5:00–7:00, Sunday, November 20
- Information here
The Grand Piano is an experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with the rise of Language poetry in San Francisco—Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. The Grand Piano takes its name from a coffeehouse at 1607 Haight Street in San Francisco where a weekly reading and performance series took place beginning in 1976. The ten-volume project was completed in 2010. It not only addresses literature and the arts in the 1970s, when the authors first met and collaborated, but also aesthetic and political issues in the time in which it was written.
