A few months ago I had the opportunity to hear Tongo Eisen-Martin read with Rae Armantrout at the Poetry Project. Anyone who has heard this young San Francisco poet recite his exhilarating work from memory might recall how it felt to realize one was witnessing a very special talent, one whose work recalls the likes of Ginsburg, Whitman, and Gil-Scott Heron. This realization led me to look more closely at the following poem, with its titular nod to Gil-Scott Heron’s 1970 “Comment #1” (sampled by Kanye West in “Who Will Survive in America”), from his new book, Heaven is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017):
Wave at the People Walking Upside Down
I am off to make a church bell out of a bank window
“kitchens meant
more to the masses
back in the day”
and before that?
“we had no enemy”
somewhere in america
the prison bus is running on time
you are going to want
to lose that job
before the revolution hits
Somewhere I won’t be home for breakfast.
Everyone out here now knows my name.
And I won’t be turned against for at least four months.
The cop in the picket line is a hard working rookie.
The sign in my hand is getting more and more laughs
It says, “the picket line got cops in it.”
“I can take care of
those windows for you if you want,
but someone else
has to go in your gas tank”
was clear to the man that
rich people had talked too much this year
go ahead and throw down that marble park bench
everyone is looking up at,
you know,
get the Romans out of your mind
Maybe a good night’s sleep
would have changed
The last twenty years of my life
—Playing an instrument
Is like punching a wall—
What would you have me do?
Replace the population?
Give brotherhood back to the winter?
Stop smoking cigarettes with the barely dead?
They listen in on the Sabbath
Police called the police on me
—a white candlestick beneath my detention
“I’ve ruined the soup again,”
thought the judge
as he took off his pilgrim robe
behind a white people’s door (and more)
“I didn’t get lucky.
I got what was coming to me,”
he toasts
“fight me back,”
the man said, of course, to himself
washing windows with a will to live
tin can on his left shoulder
enjoying the bright brand new blight
with all partygoers
(both supernatural and supernaturally down to earth)
what, is this elevator traveling side to side?
Like one thousand bitter polaroid pictures that you actually try to eat
All the furniture on this street is nailed to the cement
Cheap furniture, but we have commitment
This morning, an essay opens the conversation between enemies
“why, because you control every gram of processed sugar
between here and a poor man’s border?”
“because in the tin can on my left shoulder
I can hear the engines of deindustrialization?”
—You should get into painting,
You know,
Tell lies more deeply—
This month, I’m rooting for the traitor
Carting cement to my pillow … “here we will build”
I am high again. Not talking much.
Climb the organ pipe up to our apartment floor
I’m high again. Calling everything church.
Singing along to the courtyard.
Thanks to a horn player’s holy past time
Climb up to the rustiest nail
—Put a real jacket on it
Talk about a real five years—
Keep memories like these
In my pocket
Next to the toll receipt
That man lost a wager
with the god of good causes,
you know,
stood up for himself
a little too late
(maybe too early)
I can still see
Twenty angles of his jaw
Zigzagging through
The cold world
Of deindustrialization
“There’s an art to it,” I will tell my closest friends one day
Now, here are the opening lines of Gil-Scott Heron’s “Comment #1:”
The time is in the street you know
Us living as we do upside down
And the new word to have is revolution
People don't even want to hear the preacher spill or spiel
Because God's hole card has been thoroughly peeked
And America is now blood and tears instead of milk and honey
And here we are, nearly fifty years later: the times are still “in the street;” America is still “blood and tears instead of milk and honey” for everyone on the “upside down” of our deep and pernicious racial divide. Like its predecessor, Eisen-Martin’s musical and militant poem is blunt and bleak, laden with truth and sorrow. And yet, like all of his verse, it’s a thrill to read, rocketing forward towards conflagration, change, or both — fueled by a capacious imagination, a fierce fighting spirit, and a deep and fundamental tenderness. Consider, even, the gently ironic injunction of the title, to “wave” at the people walking upside down in their brutally exclusionary bubble of privilege. Or the empathy implied for those with the bitter task of keeping members of their own communities in line: “[t]he cop in the picket line [who] is a hard working rookie” or the prison bus driver gently advised to “lose that job / before the revolution hits.”
Highlighting the sacred in the mundane, the transcendent in the “supernaturally down to earth,” this poem addresses the pain (and necessity) of making art from the kind of oppression that makes “[p]laying an instrument /. . . like punching a wall,” as well as the through-line from that oppression to truth: “because in the tin can on my left shoulder I can hear the engines of deindustrialization.” Declaring his own mission in the opening line, the poet is “off to make a church bell out of a bank window.” How to fashion sacred beauty (“church bell”) from mundane and soulless mammon (“bank window”)? “There’s an art to it,” Eisen-Martin explains.
In the world of this poem, such tensions are generative, like that between individuality and community, or between present and past, the voices of which are sampled in this poem. Some remarks (enclosed in quotation marks) seem to come from an older generation, invoking the way things were “back in the day,” perhaps to help those struggling with the “blood and tears” of here and now. Who but those old enough to know how to smooth the rough edges of the past in order to ease their way forward could convince themselves of a time when “we had no enemy?”
Perhaps Eisen-Martin’s plenitude of voices is one foundation (like “a horn player’s holy past time”) for an alternative canon, rooted in the “supernaturally down to earth:” a foundation for the poet’s own poiesis that empowers him to “go ahead and throw down that marble park bench / everyone is looking up at, / you know, get the Romans out of [his] mind,” replacing them with “[a]ll the furniture on this street . . . nailed to the cement.” An overdue replacement for the kind of power structure in which a judge passing through the “white people’s door” in a “pilgrim’s robe” sentences a fellow human being to prison while day-dreaming about “ruin[ing] the soup again” and patting his own privilege on the back by bragging: “I didn’t get lucky. / I got what was coming to me.”
Shamefully, the world behind that judge’s “white people’s door” is no less “upside down” from the world of this poem than it was in Gil-Scott Heron’s time. The modern day “bright brand new blight” signals no more genuine progress than an “elevator traveling side to side.” The truth of this poem, and of this country in 2017, is as bitter as “one thousand bitter polaroid pictures that you actually try to eat.” Nonetheless, this remarkable poet can somehow “[c]limb the organ pipe up to our apartment floor / . . . Calling everything church. / Singing along to the courtyard.” How? “There’s an art to it,” which makes it irresistible to listen.
Heaven Is All Goodbyes
Pocket Poets Series No. 61
Tongo Eisen-Martin
City Lights Books (2017)
ISBN-10 0872867455
ISBN-13 9780872867451
$16
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