Ten of the Language poets, each of whom at one time curated the reading series at the San Francisco coffee house of that name, collaborated to write "The Grand Piano", "an experiment in collective autobiography" published in ten small volumes. Editing and communication for the collaboration was accomplished over email. Authors of The Grand Piano were Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, Ted Pearson, and Kit Robinson. An eleventh member of the project, Alan Bernheimer, served as an archivist and contributed one essay on the filmmaker Warren Sonbert. The authors of The Grand Piano sought to reconnect their writing practices and to "recall and contextualize events from the period of the late 1970s."