Album by Tongo Eisen-Martin Review By D.S. Waldman
I go to the railroad tracks and follow
them to the station of my enemies
by Tongo Eisen-Martin
Review By D.S. Waldman
Rocks In Your Head Records
37min 13sec
Publication date: June 18, 2022
https://tongoeisen-martin.bandcamp.com/
It is as light through a prism that language passes through Tongo Eisen-Martin. And it does feel, especially in his new poetry album i go to the railroad tracks and follow them to the station of my enemies, that language is passing through Eisen-Martin, that he is a conduit for some greater and unnameable poetic energy. I say this not to discount the tremendous talent and labor required to create and put into the world poems like Eisen-Martin’s—long, rhythmically charged as they are, knitting the surreal into the everyday particulars of, in this instance, the San Francisco Bay area—rather, I mean to highlight what feels often an otherworldly fluidity in Eisen-Martin’s language and delivery:
Hey, by the way—time is not an allusion, your honor. I will save your death for last. You’re witty, your honor. You’re moving money again, your honor. And it’s only raining one thing: non-white cops and prison guard shadows reminding me of spoiled milk floating on an oil spill in a neighborhood making a lot of fuss over its demise…*
The album is divided into sides a and B, into two poems—i go to the railroad tracks and follow them to the station of my enemies and i see why everyone out here got in the big cosmic basket— though without looking at the time marker, it’s not entirely clear where one poem ends and the other begins. Eisen-Martin Proceeds in gusts, beginning at a conversational pace and launching, or being swept, into an oratorical rapture as certain of its sonic orchestration as of its political commitments:
I see why everyone out here got in the big cosmic basket, and why blood agreements mean a lot, and why I get shot back at. I understand the psycho-spiritual refusal to write white history or take the glass freeway. White skin tattooed on my right forearm, ricochet sewers where I collapse into a rat-infested manhood.
If in hearing lines like these from Eisen-Martin the listener can abstain from any attempts at linear interpretation, at discerning specific meaning and metaphor from the poem’s steady reel of images and assertions, she might just find herself awash in one of the single most distinctive styles of any poet writing in English today. “To speak of style,” writes Susan Sontag in her seminal 1967 essay Against Interpretation, “is one way of speaking about the totality of a work of art.” And i go to the railroad tracks and follow them to the station of my enemies is—demands to be treated as—a totality (just in writing out the album’s full title, there is a sense that the piece must be wholly transported, a single unit which resists dissection or modal analysis).
Especially without the written word, the written line to follow while listening, the unit of measure, here, is not the syllable, nor the line or stanza—this poem refuses such tidy absorption—no this poem seems, at least sonically, to ride the breath toward, through, and beyond the right margin. Words, images, meditations steaming off the cliff with enough energy to continue outward, into sky, with no groundward plummet:
Young man you will come to admit that sometimes suicide is power. Because some people live stronger as ghosts. And sometimes the afterlife empties billions of souls into everyday objects like playground bullets and abandoned door frames. Even broken glass will prove it has a voice too. There are 24 hours behind your back, man. Look over your shoulder right now—can you hear it, the sound of drums punching themselves out?
I can’t help but hear in lines like these at least a little bit of Whitman. The direct address of “Young man,” for one thing, recalls Whitman’s “Dear reader”—an invitation and an indictment, and intimacy in an urgency. Perhaps more specifically Whitmanic, though, is the aforementioned sense that Eisen-Martin’s lines, though I’ve transcribed them here as prose, extend as a single unbroken line, transcending the right margin, the page, unfurling into open air. If the Whitman line, extending as it does beyond the material constraint of the page, ,can be experienced as a formal manifestation of Whitman’s hopes for the American political project** (“Thou Union holding all, fusing, absorbing, tolerating all, / Thee, ever thee, I sing), if we can read the length and inclusiveness of his lines as an effort to “hold all” and enact a new American plurality, might we experience the form and style of Eisen-Martin’s poem as similarly and necessarily political?
Malcom X’s ballroom jacket slung over my son’s shoulder, the figment, a village, a new noose to a new white preacher—all in an abstract painting of a president…
The fact of this album—that it is an album free to stream online and, thus, available to anyone with internet access—does lend the work a quality of being “of the people.” One does not have to pay to experience this art. And that experience, for the “untrained” poetry reader (a term I use mostly ironically to refer to a reader who has not learned in an academic setting how, traditionally, to read a poem), is not hindered by the visual or written artifice of a poem. Formal devices such as line- and stanza breaks will not trip up a reader new to poetry because they—visual, writtten devices—are not there.
In Against Interpretation, Sontag offers the following quotation from Cocteau: “Style is the soul… Style assumes the form of the body.” And I wonder if Eisen-Martin’s poem, the political body it assumes, is yet more inclusive than the Whitman line. In particular I’m interested in the often nonlinear, associative logic of Eisen-Martin’s verse. Even listening closely or on repeat, as I have been, I find it difficult to provide a clean praxis for the poem, or even for a given line:
…a merciful Marxism! Disquieted home life a metaphor for relaxing next to a person who’s relaxing next to a gun…
Rather, the experience is one of cobbling together feelings and associations from the flowing collage that the poem, for me, amounts to. In its range of diction and images, fluid shifts in register, and references to social and historical theory, Eisen-Martin’s collage—more so I would argue than Whitman’s line, which claims to “hold all”—actually contains multitudes. Sontag reminds us that styles “belong to a time and place… our perception of a style (is) always charged with an awareness of the work’s historicity.” In this context Eisen-Martin’s poem might, through its style, assume a sort of body politic, a self-portrait of a nation on the brink of revolution. This poem does not speak to a political or historical moment—it is the moment. It is us. We are “gassing backwards out a one-way.” We are “the tea kettle preparing everyone for police sirens.”
i go to the railroad tracks and follow them to the station of my enemies is a mosaic. A mirror, sharded. In it I hear us—I hear us trying to see us. And this, to me, disorienting though it can be, feels true.
*Because no written lyrics are available for this album, the lines I cite in this essay are merely an estimation, my own approximation of the text and how it might, on the written page, present. I apologize for any inaccuracies.
**See: Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry
Tongo Eisen-Martin was born in San Francisco, California, and received an MA from Columbia University. He is the author of Someone’s Dead Already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), which was nominated for a California Book Award, and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Publishers, 2017), which received the California Book Award and an American Book Award. A poet, movement worker, and educator, his latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He is the current poet laureate of San Francisco, California.
D.S. Waldman is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His work has appeared in Kenyon Review, LitHub, Narrative, and other publications. Waldman has received additional support and awards from Middlebury College, and San Diego State University, where he earned his MFA. He serves as poetry editor at Adroit.
12 October 2022
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