Poet born of San Francisco’s ‘revolution’
Tongo Eisen-Martin taps into imagery rooted in lifelong activism, providing a voice for the city’s voiceless
Last month, Tongo EisenMartin was named San Francisco poet laureate. The poet, educator and movement worker is the eighth person to hold the post since Lawrence Ferlinghetti was first appointed to the role in 1998.
Born and raised in the city, Eisen-Martin has described himself and his poetry as “an absolute product of every nook and cranny of San Francisco.” His critically acclaimed second book “Heaven Is All Goodbyes” was published under the acclaimed mantle of City Lights’ Pocket Poets Series. It was awarded the 2018 California Book Award for Poetry.
Eisen-Martin writes with a “style compressed and personal enough to conjure Amiri Baraka, Baudelaire and Bob Kaufman,” as Terrance Hayes put it in the New York Times. His poems are polyphonic symphonies of discursive scenes and scattered dialogue. The exploding kaleidoscope of imagery is at times dissonant and surreal, but his work is very much rooted in this world. This world and its ills.
His are poems that speak to the prison-industrial complex (“somewhere in America / the prison bus is running on time / you are going to want / to lose that job / before the revolution hits”), systemic racism (“This dream requires more condemned Africans / Or (put another way) / State violence rises down”), the deindustrialized American city (“I’m down on my luck / making snow angels / on the abandoned factory loading dock”) and the endless
dead-end streets of a rigged game (“the pyramid of corner stores fell on our heads / — we died right away”).
A lifelong activist, EisenMartin has taught at detention centers throughout his career. A curriculum he developed on the extrajudicial killing of Black people in the U.S. has been used as an educational and organizing tool across the country, according to the mayor’s office. In speaking about his teaching work, he preaches the power of liberatory education through art. “The power to name the world, to name social realities, to name yourself, to name your position in it” is an underestimated skill, he says.
I spoke to Eisen-Martin about his new role, and the past and future of his everchanging city. Here’s some of our conversation, lightly
edited for clarity.
I’ve heard you describe your upbringing as “revolutionary.” Can you tell us a little bit about the San Francisco you grew up in?
I think one of the underemphasized victories of the ‘60s movements was a revolutionary kind of cultural stronghold that remained. The landscape of San Francisco was populated by liberated square feet, where I was given a cultural life that centered the African diaspora and revolutionary politics and analysis.
So the white power structure never seemed that big and bad to us growing up. This kind of radical landscape gave us a mental, almost spiritual, immune system that would prepare us to deal with the hegemonic reality of the United
States, and come out of it with our outlook intact. Really, with our faith in humanity intact.
Were both of your parents activists?
Yeah. My mother more than my father. My father was politicized by my mother.
You were quite literally born in the Mission, right? In an apartment building on Valencia Street?
25th and Valencia.
Do you still recognize the place that the Mission has become?
No. The Mission was turned into what’s really like a corporate campus . ... It’s really just a playground for these kind of transient soldiers of the bourgeoisie.
We were ripped out of San Francisco. Though this kind of war against nonwhite communities in San Francisco is actually decades old. This attrition comes with grandmothers being forcibly removed from homes by police or sheriffs, it comes with gang injunctions . ... It comes with hyper-policing. It’s not just that we lost some kind of economic gain, or we didn’t play our cards right. It was an aggressive liquidation of nonwhite communities.
You launched your first publishing venture last year — a small press “committed to the exploration of liberation.” What kind of work does Black Freighter seek to publish?
Black Freighter Press is a press for Black and brown writers, anti-imperialist writers. We belong to the revolutionary imagination. We are also committed to publishing incarcerated writers.
How do you see your new role as poet laureate?
The San Francisco Library is filled with beautiful, beautiful people working there. The poet laureate station operates out of the library. They’ve been completely open, giving me free rein with any of their resources I can think to use to bring cultural work down into the trenches. At the same time, it’s straightforward equations — teaching workshops, facilitating reading and participating in publications . ... It’s a nice stamp, and it does incentivize some people to add some poetry to their diet.
You haven’t been shy about critiquing San Francisco or comparing it to a dystopia. Do you foresee getting any
pushback now that you’re an official ambassador of sorts?
No. I have not yet. Maybe I’m in the middle of a honeymoon that I’m not aware of that will perhaps end. But San Francisco does have a radical history. San Francisco always had a revolutionary potential. Regardless of what’s institutionally pronounced, you can’t count out the actual beliefs of the people. Even the people working in the institutions.
Salesforce, San Francisco’s largest private employer, announced last week that most of its employees will be allowed to permanently work remotely at least part of the time. What do you make of the so-called tech exodus, and how do you see it affecting the future of the city?
If I’m not mistaken, the corporate population of San Francisco has ebbed and flowed before. The tide rises and falls. As long as power is not in the hands of the people, especially nonwhite people, then five or 10 years [from now] we could have a whole new hyper-gentrification . ... To me, it’s a matter of power. As long as the corporatocracy maintains the most hegemony in the city, the moves their workforces make don’t matter.
Rent dropped 27% or something like that recently. But a 27% drop in a farcical monthly sum in the first place, what does that really matter? Instead of taking an arm and a leg, they just take a leg? That’s not really going to help nonwhite people, workingclass people and those that struggle even more. It doesn’t feel like a new social topography in San Francisco.