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.

About the author: 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 eleventh pianist, Alan Bernheimer, takes the lead in organizing documentation for the books. THE GRAND PIANO takes its name from a coffeehouse at 1607 Haight Street in San Francisco where from 1976 to 1979 several of writers programmed and coordinated—and all of them participated in a weekly reading and performance series. The project focuses on the 1970s when they first met and collaborated. Yet the volumes engage issues beyond that time, and the project adheres to no prescribed set of themes.