In this episode of Ear Expansion, host LaMont Hamilton speaks with Tongo Eisen-Martin about the revolutionary atmosphere that shaped his poetry and praxis. Tongo reflects on his upbringing in San Francisco within alternative community institutions, and music as a vessel for spirit and a foundation for craft. They discuss imagination made praxis, resisting bourgeois cultural subjugation, police terror and dehumanization, and a relational ethos summarized as “the humanization of others is the only thing that humanizes me,” linked to interconnected reality and craft. Tongo explains his polyvocal, trickster-inflected poetic method and discusses the We Charge Genocide, Again curriculum as a creative, flexible tool for ideological clarity about extrajudicial killings as systemic policy, writing against tyranny toward liberation, and collective survival.
