Literary Nonfiction. Biography and Memoir. PART 10 is the final installment of the Grand Piano "experiment." This volume draws some of its themes from experimental music, current Amercian politics, newspaper headlines, and an array of influnces (Kathy Acker, Lorenzo Thomas, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Robert Grenier, Larry Eigner, Clark Coolidge). At the same time, almost all the pieces of the ending volume make some kind of return to the complicated impulses that initally launched the project: autobiography, resistance to autobiography, writing, language-as-such, memory, time, and especially the rich historical meeting point of these ten authors in the Bay Area literary scene(s) of the 1970s.

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.