The Grand Piano Part 9

by Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten

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.

224 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2009

About the author

Ron Silliman has written and edited 30 books to date, most recently articipating in the multi-volume collaborative autobiography, The Grand Piano. Between 1979 & 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, entitled The Alphabet. In addition to Woundwood, a part of VOG, volumes published thus far from that project have included ABC, Demo to Ink, Jones, Lit, Manifest, N/O, Paradise, (R), Toner, What and Xing. The University of Alabama Press will publish the entire work as a single volume in 2008. Silliman has now begun writing a new poem entitled Universe.

Silliman was the 2006 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and was a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council as well as a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry.