An online roundtable discussion with Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten

The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography was written by ten poets who emerged in the San Francisco language writing scene in the 1970s. The work takes its title from the coffee house in the Haight-Ashbury District where they met, read, performed, organized, and generated high-visibility energy and controversy in both Bay Area and national literary communities. In the 00s, having found themselves “midway through our life” and being widely dispersed from that “original” time and place, they reconstituted the group online and collaboratively wrote, edited, designed, and published a ten-volume “Collective Auto­biography” that brought together both the past (the years 1975–80) and the present, at the time of writing (about 2005–10). On its completion in 2010, reviews and comments were correlated; a digital archive was constructed and maintained; and the work was sampled and presented in group performances in New York and the Bay Area. An additional ten years later, with the final reserves of the print edition coming off the shelves, the authors organized Grand Piano TV, an online Zoom reading series, running from August 2022 to January 2023. In that format, each author gives a dedicated reading that returns to but radically reorganizes the published work; the readings are uploaded to YouTube and will eventually be housed at PennSound. At Kelly Writers House, the entire group will assemble in a Zoom Room for selected presentations and collective discussion of the issues engaged by their decades-spanning project—future possibilities now engaged toward new openings.