Poet makes the most of being different

New York poet Lemon Andersen. Photo / Supplied

Lemon Andersen tells David Larsen how his time in prison led to a career in poetry.

Lemon Andersen's life reads like an inspirational screenplay, which is perhaps why someone has, in fact, made his life into a movie. Minor plot spoiler for the movie of his life: at about the halfway mark, Spike Lee taps him on the shoulder and he starts appearing in movies. Otherwise, he tells me, his appearance at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival this month would not mark his first visit to New Zealand.

"Yeah, interestingly enough, I was given the opportunity to go out to New Zealand years ago when I was touring the Broadway show I was in, Def Jam Poetry On Broadway. I had to miss that trip, which was a shame, I really wanted to go, but it came just when Spike got me involved with acting in movies. This is exciting for me to come there now, I can't wait. I'm a different kind of artist, so I'm always happy to to go somewhere new and showcase that."

"Different" is Andersen's key word. As a poet, his sense of who he is starts with the idea that he's not like all the other poets. "It took me a while to find my position as an artist and as a poet. I'm a mixed-race kid in America, you know? So culturally I wasn't doing what other poets were doing. My voice was very different, I was urban and I was mixed-race, so trying to find my niche in the poetry scene, that took a bit of time."

The feeling of being different starts earlier for him than his first attempts at poetry, because even in the Brooklyn Projects where he grew up, and even at home in his own minority-ethnic family, Andersen didn't look like the other kids. That's how he got his first name.

"My real first name is Andrew. But I grew up in this partly Latino, predominantly black American neighbourhood, and I was the only white kid. My father was Norwegian and I was the only one of my brothers and sisters who had a different dad. My mother was Puerto Rican, they all had dark skin. So I got the name as a joke, they used to call me Lemonhead, 'wassup, Lemonhead'.Then after a while I wasn't really letting people call me that, but I let them call me Lemon. I was constantly having to defend myself and how I looked, because I looked different from everyone else."

The sense of standing on the line between two well-defined identities, of slipping between the cracks in people's categories, informs Andersen's thinking on a fundamental level. Other Americans look at Barack Obama and see the first black president. Andersen sees a mixed-race person playing people's insufficiently subtle reading of his identity to his own advantage.

Andersen's own identity has seemed partly a matter of personal choice to him for as long as he can recall, even when he was being bullied as a child.

"Oh yeah, I used to get a hard time. But I also had this very hard-core brother. They called him Warlock. He was into satanic music, it was just a phase that kids go through, but for a Puerto Rican to go through that, it was considered a serious thing. He's a military police officer in the army now, and it's lucky he found a great place to channel that energy, because he's built for war.

"So yeah, people tried to pick on me, but they also knew my brother was this dangerous guy, so they had to be a little bit careful and a lot of times I actually used to let people pick on me, because I knew that if I made a thing of it and my brother found out, the consequences were going to be steep."

In other words, even the apparently clear-cut category of "childhood bullying victim" was something Andersen had to choose to opt in or out of. It's no wonder his favourite childhood work of poetry - Dr Seuss' The Butter Battle Book - is about people so wedded to simplistic oppositions they end up going to war over the right way to butter sliced bread.

But he did not really discover poetry until his mother, his father and his step-father had all died of Aids, leaving him homeless and living on the streets, at the age of 15.
"I ended up getting incarcerated.

They locked me up for being a troublemaker. That was part of our neighbourhood culture, you know? Everyone was being locked up. [In prison] I had nothing but time and that's when I started reading poetry.

"I didn't start writing until I went to a showcase when I got out, and I saw guys reading poetry on stage. I didn't know you could do that. So I took a shot at it and it turned out I was good at it."

That very first open mic stage appearance led to a job offer with an acting troupe, which led to television appearances, Def Jam Poetry On Broadway, minor parts in Spike Lee projects and other film work and, this year, a major documentary about his life and career, called simply Lemon, currently screening at the Documentary Edge Film Festival. All because he walked up on a stage, fresh out of prison, and took a shot at performance poetry.

"I'd read a lot. A lot of these young poets today, they don't read a lot of other people's stuff, they don't know about all the styles there are out there. That's what I had that made me different I guess."

* Lemon Andersen is a guest at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Aotea Centre, May 9-13.