S.F. Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin carries a heavy burden but rides a cultural wave | Culture

Rarely has a contemporary poet in California, or anywhere else in the US, addressed enemies so directly, and rarely has a poet aimed to be as confrontational as he has. Not surprisingly, he has often been called a “revolutionary”. As a black poet in a city with a declining black population and a nation still trying to reckon with the curse of racism, he carries a heavy burden. “Walking down a street in the Bay Area is really walking through a dystopia,” he says.

The city’s mean streets inform his four volumes of poetry, as well as a 2022 LP with the provocative title “I Go to the Railroad Tracks and Follow Them to My Enemies’ Station.” Tongo’s “railroad tracks” may lead readers to think of the underground network that brought slaves from southern plantations to freedom in the north, although the tracks he has in mind—they may be his free range—run toward enemies. that are not far from them.

While he describes himself as an introvert, this is not evident when he performs in public. He recites long poems from memory; listeners are amazed by his verbal feats. Indeed, his performances are as impressive as anything in the virtuoso repertoire of Allen Ginsberg, the Beat poet who initiated the oral poetry tradition in San Francisco in 1955, along with Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and others. , with KPFA’s Kenneth Rexroth as MC and Jack. Kerouac in the audience shouting “Go, Go, Go”.

How does he do it? listeners ask. “I don’t have a photographic memory,” Eisen-Martin explains. “I rehearse and memorize. When I perform I pay attention to the audience in front of me and I have to be aware of the words that come next.”

All of this and more can cause anxiety.

In the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, and in the wake of Black Lives Matter, more African-American poets than ever before have been published in prestigious magazines like the New Yorker. They are also more widely read and appreciated now than ever before.

This summer, Eisen-Martin released his LP “Railroad Tracks” from Rocks in Your Head Records, a San Francisco label founded by Sonny Smith in 2018. The launch took place at the third-floor African American Center at the Library San Francisco Public. “We’re here to celebrate Tongo’s registration,” announced black librarian Natalie Enright. With Tongo were three young poets, whom he introduced as “a motley crew of misfits”: Landi Rev, Meilani Clay and Landon Smith.

“They kill poets like me,” Eisen-Martin told the audience. Then, as if to soften that barb, he added: “All advances in art come from bouncing off each other’s psyches.” During the interview with Sonny Smith that followed the reading, Tongo-Martin explained that “writing from a state of boredom is ideal for me” and “I’d rather die than not be part of the liberation.” Balancing the demands of revolution and the demands of poetry requires discipline.

His father Zi is no longer alive. His leftist Jewish mother, Arlene Bergman, lives in San Francisco. The dedication for “Blood on the Fog” (2021) reads, “To my mother.” His brother Biko designed the book cover. Dramatic moments have marked his life, though he doesn’t like to talk about his biography, fearing, he says, that new readers will assume his trajectory must be followed if one is to be published and achieve fame.

Wanna-be poets have emulated such notable figures as Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, and June Jordan, who was born in Harlem and died in Berkeley and who inspired several generations of black poets, including women poets who read with Eisen- Martin. in the bookstore.

Despite his reluctance to talk about his past, it may be helpful for readers to know that Tongo attended public schools in The City and Branson in Marin County. Sometimes his was the only black face in a sea of ​​white faces. After graduating from Columbia in New York with BA and MA degrees, he taught inmates in prisons from New York to California and helped educate his generation about genocide.

The San Francisco poet laureates who preceded Tongo-Martin—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Janice Mirikitani, devorah major, Jack Hirshman, Diane di Prima, Alejandro Murguía, and Kim Shuck—expanded readers for verse in the Bay Area. Almost all are published by City Lights. The monk invited poets from Latin America to San Francisco. The major traveled a lot. Tongo-Martin has been perhaps the least visible of the seven, although in December 2021 he was interviewed on stage at the Goldstein Theater in Sydney by Jeff Chang for the City Arts and Lectures series.

When he was named poet laureate in January 2021, there was no vaccine for Covid. “There was very little to do,” says Tongo-Martin. When the pandemic subsided, he started both Zoom and in-person events. The city authorities would like him to perform more often than he has done so far. He’s taken his job and hit the road probably more than any other poet laureate of SF.

Black poets, dancers, musicians and novelists from Claude McKay and Josephine Baker to Charlie Parker and James Baldwin flocked to Europe in the 20th century to escape blatant racism and revel in the adoration Paris offered. White American artists of all stripes, from Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway to Chet Baker, also benefited from European hospitality and generosity.

Not long ago, Eisen-Martin brought his poetry to Mexico. This fall, he will travel to Amsterdam, perform with a trumpet player and make a recording. Meanwhile, his LP and books are available from City Lights Books and elsewhere and from the public library. His works can also be found on YouTube.

Those unfamiliar with his poetry may expect to find it difficult, challenging, and even dark, but that is not a criticism. As Ferlinghetti often said, if a poem is difficult, the reader will spend more time with it and derive more meaning and more pleasure than with a poem in which the work is transparent. What you get out of it is what you put into it.

Much of the most innovative modern poetry, including the work of WB Yeats, TS Eliot and Anna Akhmatova, is complex and elusive. Eisen-Martin shares their commitment to complexity and their commitment to “making it new,” in the words of Ezra Pound. “I want to try something I’ve never tried before,” says Eisen-Martin.

Readers eager to explore his writing and hear his voice, which can be loud, modulated, angry, sarcastic and lyrical, can start with his LP, which is available on vinyl and digital and begins: “I go to the railroad tracks and follow them to the station of my enemies.” Readers can then go to his first book, Dead Now: (Bootstrap Press, 2015) and on to Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017), which received an American Book Award 2018 and a California Book 2018 Award.

City Light publisher and executive director Elaine Katzenberger is three times proud of Eisen-Martin’s work. He is not only an activist and a poet, but also a native. Heaven Is All Goodbyes was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize 2018. The Griffin judges noted that Eisen-Martin’s work “moves between sharp political critique and dream associations”. The poem, “Older Then Younger,” begins, “Grandma, why do you never speak of your children that the first world killed?” The grandmother replies: “Because, son, I haven’t run out of knife handles.” In another poem titled, “We Can All Refuse to Die at the Same Time” (the words are not capitalized), he writes, “They lynched his car, too. They tied it right next to him.” One might call it Eisen-Martin’s version of the humor tripod.

Blood on the Fog, his most recent book, is number sixty-two in the City Lights Pocket Poets series. It joins a distinguished list of works by stellar poets and travels from factories to battlefields and from San Francisco to Mississippi. Near the end of August, Eisen-Martin returned to his time as Poet Laureate and forward to the year ahead. “I’d like to start a writing program in prison,” he said. “Also, bring together writers from different generations. Fate awaits you.”