THE GRAND PIANO, Part 1
An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980
Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson
Mode A/This Press, $12.95 (or $90 for all 10 parts, published quarterly)

“Not that any one of our identities, subject positions, station locations, is permanent. But for now, to consider the question of permanence—relative permanence—and its relation to love.

“Our group has done lots of desire-writing, I think. All of our invention comes from near there, yes? No?”

--Bob Pereleman, page 11

In 1998, around the time that the ten poets above began collaborating on this project, Nada Gordon and I began a correspondence that would ultimately be edited down and published as Swoon. Our book opens with a poem by Robert Creeley:

THE CONSPIRACY

You send me your poems,
I'll send you mine.

Things tend to awaken
even through random communication.

Let us suddenly
proclaim spring. And jeer

at the others,
all the others.

I will send a picture too
if you will send me one of you.

The poem seemed apt for what followed on many levels, including a perhaps lesser-discussed or analyzed aspect of love and/or desire: Its tendency toward exclusivity. We were not, literally, jeering at anyone, but there is, on the other side of love’s passionate engagement or focus, a kind of blotting out or exclusion, often enough actively, of “others” ... indeed, sometimes “all the others.”

Creeley shows up in The Grand Piano as well, though via a different poem, “The Door,” the penultimate stanza of which is quoted by Carla Harryman in the book:

I will go to the garden.
I will be a romantic. I will sell
myself in hell,
in heaven also I will be.

Creeley and Zukofsky, and to somewhat lesser respect Olson and Pound, cast fairly large shadows across this first part of the project—much of Barrett Watten’s entry here is about a Grand Piano reading of Zukofsky’s “A-24” and the feeling that Watten (and perhaps the others) had of being “beaten” with the “hitting end of a big stick”—the “big stick” being, obviously, the word or the idea of “love,” and which I believe (it’s not made entirely clear) refers to an exchange between Robert Duncan and Watten after (or perhaps during) a talk Watten once gave on Zukofsky. What I gather, though perhaps simplistically, is that Duncan may have expressed his own “love” for Zukofsky as a way of denying Watten’s own expression of love for the poet’s work.

But, then, that is, again, one of the things love seems to make manifest. Olson once famously said something along the lines of “Where there are no standards, there can be, really, no love.” Is that a statement about “standards,” really? Sure, why not. But it also sets up a divide, a divide that the 10 authors of the present volume, in very different ways, each speak of or at least allude to, and begin to grapple with.

There is a lot in this book about “other”ness on one level or another, and this seems, whether conscious or not, to be, yes, one of the things you’ll likely dig out of any deeper consideration of love. Tom Mandel, in his entry, wonders if love, or at least desire, which he relates to love, “objectifies.” Necessarily. I would say “yes,” or at least “most likely,” but certainly the objectification does not necessarily end with the “object” of one’s love. Love others. (“Others” there being a verb.) Love others “all the others.”

In Carla Harryman’s entry—an entry that offers most in the way of aesthetic explication or intentionality on some level—she brings up the language project’s “critique of ‘the self’,” its critique of “the authority and authorship of ‘the poet’,” and then wonders:

“Isn’t this why some of us experienced a great deal of antagonism and public attacks? That through ‘language writing’ the male authority of the poem was actively questioned?”

There is no doubt much truth to any answer beginning “yes.” But I think this project--The Grand Piano--begins to get at what may have been even more of a thorn for people—indeed, what continues to be a thorn, reading some of the early reviews of this project, not to mention some of the early “criticism” I’ve head of it anecdotally from people in person.

The group, or clique, or movement, or whatever you want to call a collection of poets passionately engaged with each other on some level, rubs some people the wrong way. Because it necessarily makes of them an “other”: especially if they are at all drawn to the writing of those people, they can, at times—perhaps at all times—feel something akin to what the spurned lover feels.

Nothing in at least this first section of The Grand Piano considers this possibility, though to be fair, the issue of language-bashing only comes up twice—in Harryman’s and Lyn Hejinian’s entries. Hejinian:

“Language-bashing as it erupted in the pages of Poetry Flash in 1979 was intended to justify broad-scale ignoring (and ignorance) of work done under its rubric and to turn even people with a predilection for it against it. The general message was that the whole project was hateful.

“But we were undertaking it for love.”

There’s no doubt about that last statement. In fact, no doubt about the last two quoted above. But why did people feel the project was hateful? Especially when, frankly speaking, it was even obvious to an outsider like myself at the time that this was, in a very real sense, an “undertaking ... for love”?

Language-bashing was, I want to say, retributive. Which is, mind you, not at all the same thing as “deserved.” Few behave more cruelly, selfishly, and carelessly than the jilted lover—didn’t I just read some horrific account last night of some guy who dragged an ex-girlfriend into an elevator, where he blew himself and her up? Wasn’t the shooting in the village two nights ago motivated by the shooter’s paranoia that the bartender he shot had earlier gotten a good friend of the shooter’s fired?

Love, and its fallout, is far more complex than even the carefully considered and nuanced prose of these 10 very different but all terrific writers have here evidenced.

That is not to say that the book is a disappointment for me. Actually, I loved—or perhaps that should be “loved”—this first section, despite my initial resistance to the idea of spending $90+, and waiting a couple of years, for the privilege of reading it all the way through.

It does, however, thwart many of the expectations one might conceivably bring to it, including some of my own—although, ultimately, that’s in great part much of the pleasure of reading it.

That said, there’s a lot going on in it, and it is decidedly various: Perelman’s chatty and even earnest come-on that opens the book; Watten’s veering but ultimately on-message account of the “A-24” reading; Steve Benson’s very Steve Benson-y “in the moment” improvisatory reply to Pereleman and Watten; Harryman’s emotionally charged memories of hearing a Creeley poem several times a week while working at the Poetry Center at SF State and later being cornered by Creeley at a party, where she was asked, repeatedly: “Where are you from?” (her hindsight retort to this is just beautiful); Mandel’s opening the “objectification” can of worms—and his seeming confession of holding at least one flame for someone involved the project; Ron Silliman’s anecdotal romp from childhood through leftist activities and relationships to his relationships with poets (he’s commented elsewhere I believe that he’s been criticized for being “anecdotal”; I personally have no problem with anecdote, and in the context of this rather heady project, especially welcome it); Kit Robinson’s fictionalized memories of his friends (I say “fictionalized” because he speaks of himself in the third person); Lyn Hejinian’s revisitation of the initial trauma of language-bashing; Rae Armantrout’s brief but pointed meditations on “love,” “desire,” and “the other” (written largely, I think, in direct response to Mandel’s entry); and finally the utterly gorgeous “Etude” by Ted Pearson that ends this set. Here’s Pearson’s first sentence:

“In the realm of desire, on the way to love—which is, whatever else it is, a name for the generosity of others, that is, for the disinterestedness of others, who cannot be otherwise, who cannot come to being except as other, to oneself certainly, but also themselves, especially to themselves, if only and if ever obliquely for themselves, and, in that obliquity, for others as well—one stops (it might be anywhere) for coffee and (there are no guarantees) for the pleasure of companionship, or at least the company of others, strangers call them, an assemblage of names that are not yet proper, that are not then or not yet known to oneself, poised, as one is, in what will have been the memory of having approached a threshold.”

The second part of Grand Piano is apparently on its way as I write this to SPD. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.