Full program video: Tongo Eisen-Martin with Marshall Trammell: October 7, 2017
Video highlight clips: Marshall Trammell solo + Tongo Eisen-Martin, "I have to talk to myself differently now" | Tongo Eisen-Martin with Marshall Trammell, from "Climbing Back Down the Wind"
Tongo Eisen-Martin was the Poetry Center’s premier Mazza Writer in Residence across the first week of October, 2017. For this evening, he collaborated with drummer/composer and writer Marshall Trammell in a first-time improvised duo performance at The Green Arcade. The event, co-sponsored by The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade, was free and open to the public.
Also: Mazza Writer in Residence Tongo Eisen-Martin, in Performance and Conversation
Thursday October 5, 7:00pm at The Poetry Center
Tongo Eisen-Martin, a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States, has taught in detention centers from New York’s Rikers Island to California county jails. He has been a faculty member at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, and designed curricula for oppressed people’s education projects from San Francisco to South Africa. His first full-length book of poems, Someone’s Dead Already (Bootstrap Press), was nominated for a California Book Award. He recently lived and organized around issues of human rights and self-determination in Jackson, Mississippi. His second book, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, will be out as the latest from City Lights Books’ venerable Pocket Poets series.
View Tongo Eisen-Martin and Jasmine Gibson, Sept 8, 2016 at The Poetry Center
Highlight video clips:
Tongo Eisen-Martin | Jasmine Gibson
Marshall R. Trammell is the founder and Chief Investigator of Music Research Strategies, an interdisciplinary artist performing-ethnomusicology, political education, and social engagement platform working with video, sound, music, text, geography, and data collection environments. Trammell's work combines re-imaginings of ‘narratives of fugitivity,’ tactical media and solidarity economics of the Underground Railroad for today’s political landscape. Trammell is the percussionist in Black Spirituals (listen here), an interdisciplinary, electro-acoustic artist collective. With his individual work and the collective Black Spirituals, Trammell has performed and curated work nationally and internationally. Black Spirituals’ work has received a nomination from USA Artists and wide recognition from The Wire magazine, New York Times, and more, plus many festivals and venues in Europe and North America, and was included in documenta 14, 2017. Trammell is a researcher-in-residence at Prelinger Library in San Francisco, producing a body of work called “Indexical Moment/um.” In addition to his art practice, Trammell’s Music Research Strategies will tour areas in North America promoting “Library Underground: Interiors of Opposition,” an archive. He received his MFA fellowship in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2004-06. His work is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, but he supports his family in Atwater, CA.