Poet Tongo Eisen-Martin (S3E29)

Photography by Michelle Kilfeather

Poet Tongo Eisen-Martin was born into a revolutionary home.

Tongo's parents met in Chicago but moved to San Francisco soon after. He was born and raised in an apartment at 25th and Valencia, part of a communal environment that taught him to question and analyze institutions from a young age.

He got started with poetry in elementary school doing a rap for Jesse Jackson when Jackson ran for president in 1988 (Tongo was 8 at the time).

Tongo started seeing poetry all around The City and the Bay Area before heading to New York City for college, where he soon discovered Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He ended up working in arts-based education with imprisoned youth at Rikers Island before returning to San Francisco to teach chronically truant kids through a YMCA program.

In Part 2, Tongo describes the changes he saw in his hometown of San Francisco after spending a few years in New York. It was obvious that money had done its part to stifle, displace, and erase art and the working class.

He started teaching with SF YMCA's CARE program, which works with imprisoned youth in The City, but some shady goings on in the program spurred him to leave. He went to Jackson, Mississippi, to do some movement work for a couple years before returning once again to San Francisco in 2015. He began writing poetry while in Mississippi, and when he got back to the Bay Area, it took off after Chinaka Hodge asked him to read before her at City Lights.

To end Part 2, we asked Tongo to read one of his poems for us. Here's what he recited (not read):

The Course of Meal
Apparently, too much of San Francisco was not there in the first place
This dream requires more condemned Africans
Or
State violence rises down
Or
Still life is just getting warmed up
Or
army life is looking for a new church and ignored all other suggestions
or
folk tale writers have not made up their minds as to who is going to be their friends 
“this is the worst downtown yet. And I’ve borrowed a cigarette everywhere
…I’ve taken many walks to the back of buses…that led on out the back of a story teller’s prison sentence… then on out the back of slave scars.”
“this is my comeback face. Though I know you can’t tell…”
“I left my watch on the public bathroom sink and took the toilet with me. I threw it at the first bus I saw eating single mothers half alive. It flew through the line number… then on out the front of the white house”
hopefully you find comfort downtown. But if not, we’ve brought you enough cigarette filters to make a decent winter coat
a special species of handshake
let’s all know who’s king and what the lifespan is of uniform cloth
this coffin needs to quit acting like those are birds singing
those rusty nails have no wings
and have no voice other than a white world dying
there are indeed book pages in the gas pump
catchy isn’t it?
the way three nooses is the rule
the way potato sack masks go well with radio codes
Or the way condemned Africans fought their way back to the ocean only to find waves made of
burned up1920’s piano parts
European backdoor deals
and red flowers for widows who spend all day in the sun mumbling at San Francisco
“what’s the color of a doctor visit?”
Book titles in the street like:
*Hero, You’d Make A Better Zero*
*Fur Coat Lady, The President Is Dead*
*Pay Me Back In Children*
*They Hung Up Their Bodies In Their Own Museums*
-and other book titles pulled out of a drum solo
RUN HERE, HERO!
-lied the hiding place
all the bullets in ten precincts know where to go
no heaven (nor any other good ideas) are in the sky
politics means: people did it and people do it.
understand that when in San Francisco
and other places that were never really there
bet this ocean thinks it’s an ocean
but it’s not.
it’s seventh and mission.
“All know who is king. King of thin things. Like america. I’m proud to deserve to die… I will eat my dinner extra slow tonight in this
police state candy dispenser that
you all call a neighborhood… “
no set of manners
goes unpunished
never mind about
a murderer’s insomnia
or the tea kettle preparing everyone for police sirens

We recorded this podcast in San Francisco during quarantine on Zoom in July 2020.