The City’s mean streets inform _Tongogara_'s four volumes of poetry, as well as a 2022 LP provocatively title 'I Go to the Railroad Tracks and Follow Them to the Station of my Enemies.'
Appointed by Mayor London Breed in 2021, he is The City’s first Black poet laureate and the only one born and raised in San Francisco. “His work on racial justice and equity, along with his commitment to promoting social and cultural change, comes at such a critical time for our city and our country,” Breed noted in a press release. At 6’ 8’’ Eisen-Martin is The City’s tallest poet laureate and probably the coolest.
While he describes himself as an introvert, that’s not obvious when he performs in public. He recites lengthy 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 San Francisco tradition of oral poetry in 1955, alongside Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and others, with KPFA’s Kenneth Rexroth as the MC and Jack Kerouac in the audience shouting “Go, Go, Go.
“They kill poets like me,” Eisen-Martin told the audience. Then, as though to soften that barb, he added, “All advances in art come from bouncing off one another’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 a part of liberation.” Balancing the demands of the revolution and the demands of poetry requires discipline.
Despite his reluctance to talk about his past, it might be useful 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 he graduated from Columbia in New York with a BA and an MA, he taught inmates in prisons from New York to California and helped to educate his own generation about genocide.
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 to bask in the adulation that Paris offered. White American artists of all stripes, from Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway to Chet Baker, also took advantage of European hospitality and generosity.
Much of the most innovative modern poetry, including work by W. B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Anna Akhmatova, is complex and elusive. Eisen-Martin shares their devotion to complexity and their commitment to “make it new,” in the words of Ezra Pound. “I want to try for something I’ve never tried before,” Eisen-Martin says.
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