 Gary, and welcome to our students and faculty and staff. We have a special treat for you tonight, and it's not me. I am Don Farish, I'm the president here, but my job is simply to introduce our speaker. And we have a very unusual situation tonight, because I'm not sure how to go about identifying who Lemon Anderson is, because he is a polymath. He does so many things so well. Officially a spoken word artist, but he's done everything it seems. He's been in movies, on television, he's written plays, he's acted, he's a poet. He's just an amazingly broad individual, and he's moved back and forth through all of these pieces of art, and put them together in unique ways. And in some respects, I think he sort of epitomizes the direction that the arts, the performing arts are going in right now, where nothing is quite as categorized as it once was. Movement back and forth in different venues seems to be the coming trend. So I've been with him most of the day, and he's never said the same thing twice, because he has so much to say. A masterclass, a lunch, a dinner, and it's just been a real pleasure having him here, and I'm really looking forward to what he has to say tonight. So welcome to the most recent of the President's distinguished speaker series, and let me introduce Lemon Anderson. Deep down, there is an old man by the river who denies him in his flow. If Martha's vineyard had a stepchild, I would be there with the rusty picket fence glow. Desert sand to a black beach bringer, ghetto Shakespearean clown, little shopper horror fanatic daydreaming of beautiful girls from skid row with black guys singing downtown, New York in exile, frozen Japan kicks, Jordan stacked next to a collection of homies locked up posing for Polaroid flicks, suffering from visions of grandeur, sucking the success out of pain, staring at dirty napkins, seeing the art in a coffee stain, cradle to the grave, distant coolness, red wine MO, 730 rudeness, south side outlaw, flying cut sleeves, 80 blocks from Tiffany's on heavy rotated, YouTube bleeds blood, flooded with anti-social justice, sniffing gunpowder out of the barrel of a propaganda musket, immediate descendant of the cool, Vietnam Draft. Boriqua mixed with lower east side heroin resulted in the aftermath. I'm from the house that steppard fetch it burnt down, lyricist lounge, poet laureate of the old hip hop underground, son of drama, child of the bard, an English soldier at adjunct court, either die or go hard, kill or be martyred. Iambic pantameter on the regular so the gift goes farther. An Aristotle thug dealing with the real, Plato is the enemy of the soul like a death jam deal. Watch me. In my 1983 Bob G, New York City's Sonneville Cues Union Square and the Rocksies, watch how these American idol simons tried to stop me, hate me when I walk through the door, love me when I blow up the spot, please. When they first see me, they never take me serious till they find out my talent don't come from the color of my skin but from my wholehearted experience to watch me. Me and my story, how I lived it. If you were my mother every morning, I'd be walking you to the methadone clinic. My older brother's in Iraq, killing corner store, Rob's America, don't forgive it. So watch me, deal with the ridicule and shame, the worst heartache and pain and how I maintained was by turning myself into the king of the poetry spit fame, watch me, turn my pennies into dimes, my darkness into shine, many of my mistakes into nailing it forever one time. Watch me make love to hard work ethics because game without ambition is game never respected. These are not words, these are my blood, sweat and tears from the real side of Franklin County to them Sussett Park peers and my homies in the prison yards to finish in the years because I'm an ex-con but an ex-con has always been a friend to me. Don't discriminate because it was written that even Jesus had a felony. So watch me be the artist who was born ready made, watch me take my lemons and make the best goddamn lemonade. So that's an abbreviated version of my solo show. I'm so honored and welcome to be here. Interestingly enough, I really don't do too many colleges and universities. A lot of people think I run around the country like other poets and travel the college circuit. I actually don't leave my house because I love to write, I love to create and I like to stay indoors and just pretty much like put out work because that's how I stay working. And so I just wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about my journey as a poet in the spoken word scene and my journey in New York and I'm gonna drop poems from you in between. It really started again, I was a dance major except it was in the streets. I danced in the streets, I danced in the train as a child for money, sometimes for just packages of Kool-Aid. I remember like some guy would just come around with packages of Kool-Aid, which were not good for us actually, but we loved it. It was so tardy and we just enjoyed that in the 80s and growing up in the 80s, I remember I was still a child about five years old and instead of violence, we danced against each other. It was like the city was a musical, you know? Living in New York City, instead of fighting each other, we would battle it out and we would battle it out in fashion, which is why I'm such a fan of clothing and I work in that world and it makes sense. But I had the sensitivity that my Norwegian father gave me and my name is Lemon Anderson, but my brother's name is Pedro Quignones and my sister's name is Caridal and my mother's name is Milagros and my other brother's name is Jose Quignones, but I came out with Andrew Anderson. And because I was so blonde and white, almost my mother thought I was gonna be albino when I came out, she was really like, but then again, I didn't mind that. I was like, that makes me different, that makes me unique. But she was so worried and yet I came out and they called me Lemon, first it was Lemonhead, but I didn't really get Lemonhead. I thought maybe we should just stick with Lemon, that makes sense. And I've always stood out in this weird way and I embraced that, I embraced standing out. I wanted to be a part of a world, a journey in my life where I did stand out. I was dancing in the street, I went into school and this guy came in, so I'm gonna read you a story about how the Feld Ballet found me, is that all right? Great. This is from my staged memoir, County of Kings. And this is a little bit about the Feld Ballet, here we go. This section is called, the Feld Ballet School is Gangster. My first day in the Feld is great. The Feld School is stuck in the middle of Manhattan's Fasting District. Going to the city is a big deal for any of us who are limited to the four brick walls of the courtyard. If you're lucky, you got to go to the city once a year and now I'm given a chance to go twice a week. I go to the floor where the Feld School is, I take a peek in one of the rooms and I think I see Leroy from fame. Man, this is fresh. In my own school, they never picked me for any of the extra activities. They only picked the PTA students to impress their parents and those kids unfortunately have two left feet. The ballet instructor brings us into a changing room where I meet up with a stoker named Arkeem from Gun Hill Road in the Bronx. Arkeem is in the back putting up his graph graffiti tag on hospital IV stickers and sticking them to the locker so I step to him. Yo, homeboy, what you write? I write glass, but they call me Arkeem though. Well, pass you row it. Courtyard Saints, I'm from TAT. The instructor comes in and hands us two white shirts and a pair of black underwear as he calls trunks. Put these on their mandatory. I feel uncomfortable having to wear these tights, but hey, if it takes me out of school every weekend to the heart of the city, then looking like a fairy isn't gonna hurt so bad. And plus, who am I to complain? I just got free underwear and a clean white tee. Miss Ann, the ballet instructor, is trying some basic choreography with the students and in walks Mr. Feld, Elliot Feld. A short crew cut silverhead white man wearing a gray sport jersey, black spandex pants, worn ballet shoes, holding a pointer stick in his hand. Mr. Feld walks towards the middle of our circle at a striking pace. He stares each and every one of us and slowly speaks, children. You have the opportunity to learn discipline. I don't expect anything less than your commitment. The wild part about Mr. Feld giving us long speech was not once did I fall asleep or even yawn. He's so real in what he's saying. One thing about growing up in the ghetto, it told you who was front and who was lying and this man isn't scared by any of us. He looks so straight in the eyes, knowing that if he ever steps foot on my block, his wallet would be paying for somebody's Chinese food takeout. After that speech, I look forward to ballet class more than I look forward to going to the city and we call the city was Manhattan. So if you grew up outside of Manhattan, you considered Manhattan the city. Well, because when apartment D5, where I live, had no heat, I had ballet routines to keep me warm. When the lights go off because we can't pay con Edison in the darkness of my room, I would leap into a PBS special of Masterpiece Theater, rubber bandaged my feet to keep a St. Louis Ark. Nobody at the Fells School is mad over little things like milligrams or methadone or face-to-face meetings with wear fear. See, in the Fells School, when you mess up, they don't blame your real father for your mistakes. Everyone seems so, what's that word Mr. Fells uses when he talks about starting the school? Driven. I came in me, make it to the second level class where they mix us up with the rich private school students who rock in brand new lead jeans. Now there's a rumor going around in the city that if you're bringing four lead patches to the local VIM, the store will give you a free pair. So our keem's on my hunt. Just as I'm about to put on my black trance ahead to class, he tells me, hey, hold up and wait for all the students to leave the change room so we can check their lockers and rip off some lead patches. I couldn't say no. And I like lead jeans just as much as every other B-Boy and B-Boy's were break dancers. I like styling, profiling, buck-wiling, being so fly, so fresh to death, keeps the B-Boy smiling, but if I get caught, it's back to dancing on the block. Lose this new world I love. Lose the style, lose the grace, but man, I really love hip hop. If only my mother Millie could afford me just one pair of those pinstripe lees, instead of wear these fake jeans, everyone calls fleas. I would go all day ballet for a pair of shell-topped Adidas, but my kicks got four stripes and everyone calls them Furitas. Being funky fresh to death has always been a dream. Forget Demi Plies. I'ma rip these lead patches off and go to V.I.M. with Akim. We end up with 12 patches in total, except the next time I show up to the fell school, they never let me in through the front door. Having a pair of lead jeans ends up not being a deal at all. The next month they went out of style. Then I was cracked on every time I wore them, because lees are for fleas. So that began my journey, right? Yeah. So I went on from there and I was fascinated with the arts. I went back and I went back to dancing on the street for money with my friends and we would just jump on these kind of like dirty mattresses to learn acrobatics. And I just kept thinking so much about all these, like the mirrors, the mirrors lined up in the sprung floors and the high ceilings that I would never go back to and how much I missed it. And I always tried to find ways to get into a room where people danced and danced ballet or modern dance. And I left hip hop dancing for a while and I was fascinated with that, but not as much as I was fascinated with ballet. From then on, my life took an unfortunate toll as I lost both of my parents to HIV and AIDS. And when you watch someone die in front of you and you pass away in front of you and you're only 13 years old, it takes a big toll on your sensitivity. Not just a huge impact on the way you see the world, but on the way you respond to it. And I think that that's where the poetic nature of my work came from at a young age. I think that I was so wounded by watching someone lose me because I don't feel like I lost my mother. I think the relationship I had with my mother because she was very fast and you'll hear a story about her as I introduced you to her character next and I introduced you to how she introduced me to my first original dancing cipher. But when I lost my mother, I watched her lose me, right? I watched her see her last vision of me and I've always been sensitive to the world, to the day by day life of any human being. I've always been sensitive to how human beings are. I get up at three in the morning to write because it's the only quiet time in New York City, right? It's not because I have a discipline and I'm an artist. I gotta get up at three in the morning. Trust me, you don't wanna do that. But it's the only time in New York City where things shut down and I need things to shut down in order to write, in order to be sensitive to the world that's sleeping around me. So I'm gonna introduce you to my mom and I'm gonna talk to you about how she introduced me to Coney Island. Would you look at that? There's so many people out there. After all the hard work, I'm finally here. The Tony Awards. Man, when they say this is the great white way they show aren't playing. Either they put some extra lighting out there, there's a whole lot of white people in that audience. I'll accuse in five minutes and I'm finna crack this stage in half. I just wish I can go up there now because this anxiety is tearing at my nerves. I just hate waiting. Some artists suffer from stage fright. I suffer from not being on stage enough. They're rounding us all up stage left. Steve Coleman plays the Hype Men and yells, death poets, what time is it? We all holler back. It's time to get live. It's time to represent. They announced the award for our category in special theatrical event. And I'm thinking, oh shit. Here we go with the word special again. Ooh, you're so special. In a special case like yours, today we have a special on special needs. Isn't that special? They're passing the award around and it finally comes to me. I stare at the chromed out Antoinette Perri coin with glory and think to myself, damn, this is real. I won. I wish I could say a couple of words, but I look over into the orchestra pit and I can see an old violinist with a permanent hickey on his neck, getting ready to play right after Russell speaks. Well, whatever, I made it. And now I'm ready to shut down Time Square with their live broadcasting. Another moment for us spit kings to rock the Tonys. We get to the location. Metal cranes are swinging oversized video cameras around a stage set in front of the Georgian Cohen statue. I jump up on stage and the cast all smile at me. Being the only performer born and raised in the city. And in all the prayers I had backstage, this is the one thing I'd always asked for. Tonight, the police barricades are all over Time Square. Traffic has stopped just so I can tell my story in TV timing. I'm in the heart of it all. Behind this city, there is a history of struggle, a beautiful struggle. These are my streets, my stories. How did I end up here? Staring down the fly-famed fashion district of 7th Avenue. Looking left to the school trips, I took the Rockefeller Center on my right, the famous arcade I played hooky at. Now sells eggnog lattes during the winter. I'm two miles away from the old unique boutique where my village people were shopped, stomped in house stairways through Washington Square's cold benches. I can still smell the glazed yips, rib tips, messaging during big checks from Goldman Sachs to the pre-911 post-car bomb of one world trade. Daydreaming of a battery park lifestyle. Instead, I had to put up with the punkness of a park slope sucker-famed repertoire. Red Hook School's own bullion, even now the bell tolls from the use of Hawkins, aluminum Louisville slugger, banging against a black Benzerhurst pair of balls to the sound dropside my only year in high school. Watching Abraham Lincoln smack Wagner varsity. And then that goes my first thought that I could ever remember, that I could ever remember. Corny Allen Beach's Himalaya. So I see my mother and I say, right? And we go back there and I say, hey, Milly, can we go to the aquarium? She looks at me and she says, no. Okay, then can we go to the Himalaya Ride to Dance? See, I knew she would say yes. That's the only thing I liked about Corny Allen in the summer anyway, because the beach is a mess hall of junk lifeguards getting robbed of the boardwalk. The sand is like walking on hot coal, plus you had broken glass everywhere. So finally, when she couldn't get no more bronze, Milly gets up. My mother, off her floor house blanket, folds it into a red pleather oversized purse and we're off to the Himalaya. I love this ride so much. It was spinning around in circles really fast and he's up and down waves and slow down and go backwards on request. The theme around the ride, all these painted mountains of snow with men skiing down the slopes. But it isn't the ride that people love about the Himalaya. It's the music. There was always a party outside and the DJ will play all the latest and classic disco joints. So when me and Milly finally got to the Himalaya, it was packed with people from all over the city. We worked our way into the flashy crowd trying our best to stay on everybody's one when all of a sudden the DJ played my mother's favorite record, Ring My Bell. She grabbed me by the hand, caught a bee and we start doing a hustle. I look up and I see Milly staring at me with those baby brown pearls, swaying a silk scarf, tightly wrapped around her dark and lovely dyed curls with the Laoway jewelry on her prison tattooed arms that she got from the Brenda lady. Tempting to lose grip towards the hook, that's when Milly lets go and gives her 10 year old man child the solo of his life. This moment of mine, medium rare, so I don't let her down. Every shimmy, every shake, every slide, every glass, slides and sink, the crowd tightens their cypher. Black folks look at me crooked eye, giving my two step, just get out of town, look. It's like no one or nothing else exists but their soul clap and the stained glass River Nile of tears salty stinging my mother's smile. I could hear her pitch perfect in the background yelling, that's my boy. Cool. So I just want to talk to you about the piece that I just recited as well. This is great for poets in the room. So the point is that you take this audience on a journey and what we wanted to do in the Himalaya ride and Himalaya piece is to show where the first initial dance came from. Because again, I'm always a dancer even as a poet. And so the first moment I got to dance with my mother and connecting that to the time we won the Tony Award and how that made sense, how the city just drove back in time to that first initial place at Corny Island. And again, we were at the masterclass today, how geography plays a role in the storytelling. You know, Seventh Avenue, the arcade where you used to play hooky at, then you keep going back and you move back and all of a sudden you move so far back that you're a child again. And you take that audience on that journey and they're there with you. And of course in flexion and all that cool stuff we learned. But the relationship that I had with my mother, which I kind of edited out, so my mother used to speak to me in Spanish and I would speak to her in English. That was her relationship. And most of her language was in curse words. So it would be like, you know, can I go to the quim? Can I go to the quim? Can I go to the quim? Can I go to the quim? Can I go to the quim? Can I go to the quim? Can I go to the quim? Can I go to the quim? How my mother spoke to me. And it was great because she's the fire and the brimstone of who I am, right? Well, my father's a sensitive Norwegian, you know, the boat man is like to call him. And so that initial relationship and losing that relationship led me into the next phase of my life, which was growing up alone as a teenager in the city, which I wasn't alone because there were many teenagers in the city. When my mother and my father passed away, I also lost their community and I lost that world. And I grew up in a methadone clinic and sometimes we see these people nodding off. I don't know if anyone's familiar with a methadone clinic, anyone? So you see these people nodding off. And what you don't know, like some of us know as like myself from experiencing these people is a lot of it is them dealing with how to survive tragedy and nodding off and numbing away their pains. If you get to meet these people, a lot of them were veterans, right? They fought these wars. A lot of them weren't even from this country. They came to this country to work and to chase the American dream and it turned into a nightmare for them. And they decided to number with a pain and that was the community my mother came from. And I was very sensitive to that as an artist. And I used to gamble. I used to bet that they would, I used to bet like a dollar that they never fall over. You know, that they would not over and never fall over. And so I wanted to capture that as a writer and I still see them in the trains of New York City. And as a writer, you know, I'm sensitive to that world because it's so important that we understand as Americans that that society exists within us, right? So I lost that world. I lost it. And I was now introduced to a new anger. It's called juvenile delinquency. You know about that place. And my mother left me with a caretaker who couldn't raise me. Her name was Mary Tookie. And she loved playing the lotto. That was her thing, scratching numbers. And so while she was scratching numbers, I was chasing the street life. I'll share a little bit about my story with Mary. But what I really wanted to do was give you a better understanding of a child who suffers at a very young age. It's a very small poem. So when I was an adolescent, I was arrested at a young age. And what hindered me was that I didn't have both parents. So when I first went to jail, the judge had asked where my parents were and none of them were alive, so they kept me. And they put me in this jail with like violent offenders and I didn't commit any violent crimes. It just got sweeped in the street. It was called the Giuliani days. You don't know about Giuliani. He was sweeping everybody off the street. And unfortunately I was given time. So they gave me a year. I spent a year in prison again picked off the street for a crime I didn't commit. And, but that's why I graduated high school. Crazy, right? And I was introduced to writing for the first time in Rikers Island, 1010 Hazen Street, I'll never forget. And I just stood outside and I was watching, well, let me give you something I wrote just yesterday. If you don't mind, is that possible? I just wrote this yesterday morning thinking about you guys and how I would share this story. So this was it. When I was a child, I sat in an American prison cell, a misplaced child of wonder, posted on a bunk, coated with lead-based paint. I used to paint pictures in my head of the world outside the gates of world, not of picket fence dreams and wealthy Sunday dinners, but of wizards with gambling problems. Birds who talk smack and so dope, cracked to dragons, blowing smoke and sorcery in bottles sold at the bodega. When I was a child, I used to dream of superheroes without capes who flew back and forth every day from the misery of their day jobs, scratching lines against the wall. I was a child, not counting the days. It was just another way for me to keep the dice rolling in my head. And if you think my love for signifying and for story is big now, you should have seen the beaming campfire-cooning mind of this juvenile delinquent, cut into a dry wall of cement and steel. All I ever wanted to do was dream out loud, see the real world through my comic books, somewhere alone, far away from home. And for the first time in my young life, I was given time to serve myself, to slow down and think, to chase the imagination, to dream, to stop time from going too fast. Like the children of the night, all white teeth and bloodshot eyes who dared to do everything you asked us to do, except dream. Dares to kill, and we will do it with pride of a patriot, but you wouldn't put a medal on our chest, just a serial number that shouldn't even have even numbers in them. Dares to cheat, steal, and fight. We will make it our muse and our music to prove ourselves, but dares to dream when we don't even know how to sleep right, with one eye always open to hazards, to have no warning signs. When I was a child, I sat in an American prison cell, a lollipop kid cut from the cloth of dead rabbits, laying on my bunk, always daydreaming in my cell. There was nothing to look forward to except time to dream. So, so after that stretch, I came home and I was introduced to a community center called O Puente. It was a really wonderful community center. They believed in these great principles and I left my neighborhood to join this new family I had and I was introduced to the arts again and to the world of poetry. And on stage, who's at Mums, somebody mentioned Mums, yeah. Mums was my first performer, I got to see. So that was wonderful that you mentioned him today. And one of the things that was really great about the world of poetry was that I was finally introduced to an art form that had very scarred people, right? I was like, everyone was so wounded. You know, everyone had these deep issues and everyone was entertaining them and some people were dealing with being, you know, their gender, their sexual preferences and people were dealing with, you know, loss and yet they were entertaining and spitting poetry. But the most beautiful thing to watch was the performing art of poetry, how they just got on stage. And there was a guy named Tecala and Tecala, the way he was spitting poetry, he was holding the mic and he would be like, he would bounce up and move out and then move around and then go like this. And then, you know, there were guys who were just holding the mic like this and just going inside of their head and I was just fascinated by this world and the expression of their scars, right? And that's when I caught up and then I jumped on the open mic and resided my first poem. And after the first poem, somebody offered me a job in theater. I was like, wow, I didn't hear the word theater more than hear the word job, you know? I was like, I didn't care about theater, right? So I signed up. But I had no idea that they were gonna shoot me into the high school systems of New York City and I had to perform in front of high school students who were judging me from the second I walked in the door like, you're whack, your acting is terrible. But it wasn't the acting, it was the writing that was terrible. And I was like, well, it's not the acting we have to change the script. Because these are not real issues these kids are dealing with. And so I started to fall in love with writing scripts for kids in high schools 20 years ago and issues that they were really dealing with, right? And so one of the poems that influenced that is a poem called Air Jordans, which I'm gonna read. My Air Jordans cost 100 with tax. My suede starters jacket says, Raiders on the back. I'm styling, smiling, looking real mean because it ain't about being heard, just being seen. My leather Deedus baseball cap matches my fake Gucci backpack. Ain't nobody out there look good as me but this cost money is showing free. And I got no job, no money at all but it's easy to steal all this from them all. Parents say I shouldn't but I know I should. Got to do what I can to make sure I looks good. And the reason I have to look real good were to tell you the truth, man, I don't know why. I guess it makes me feel special inside when I'm wearing fresh gear, I don't have to hide and I really must get some new gear soon or my ego will pop like a 10 cent balloon. The security is tight at all the shops. Every day there are more and more cops. My crew is laughing at me because I'm wearing old gear. School's almost over, summer's near and I'm sporting torn Jordans and need something new. Only one thing left to do. Cut school Friday, catch the subway downtown, check out my victims hanging around. Maybe I'll get lucky and find easy prey. Got to get some new gear, there's no other way. I'm ready and willing. This is serious business, this ain't no fun. And I can't have my posse laughing at me. I'm a cop, something dope, just wait, you'll see. Come out of the station West Fort near the park, brother's shoeing hoops and someone remarks, hey, Holmes, where you get them nikes? As I said to myself, yeah, I like some of my likes. They were Q-Tip, white, bright and blind in my eyes. The red emblem of Michael looked as if it could fly. Not once by the dirt, the airs were brand new, had my pistol knew just what to do. Waited until it was just the right time. Followed them very closely behind. He made a left turn on Houston and I pulled down my gun and I said, give me them Jordans. And the punk tried to run. Took off fast and he got far from bow. Full fell between two parked cars. He was coughing, crying, blood spilled on the street and I snatched him and Jordans off of his feet. While laying there dying, all he could say was please, man, don't take my Air Jordans away. He think he'd be worried about staying alive as I took off with his sneakers. There were tears in his eyes. Very next week I bopped into school my brand new Air Jordans, man, I was cool. I killed to get them, but hey, I don't care because now I need the new jacket to wear. Cool. So, yeah. So, great. So, the poem Air Jordans introduced me to my first mentor in writing. His name was Regi Gaines. And Regi Gaines was a really, really great teacher because Regi Gaines came from the theater. And the theater is where you really learn how to bounce those words, where you really learn how to perform and the body. And as a dancer I wanted to be a part of that world more than I wanted to be a part of the slam world. I was a big fan of slam poetry and I would go every weekend but I was too nervous to compete my soul because basically my poems were about my soul and I was a young talent. But I hung around this guy, Regi Gaines, and this is what I did with a lot of my mentors. It's what I did when I met Regi. I was annoying, right? Because if I found out you were someone who had information I needed, you would not let me go. I would stand in your driveway, I would knock on your door, I would sleep on your couch, whatever, anything you needed me to do as long as you give me the information I need to get better to progress as an artist, as a talent. So I chased Regi Gaines around the city and he finally agreed that he would mentor me on one condition, that he would pay me. He felt that if my mind was on trying to make money as an artist, then I wouldn't be focused in the classroom. And I found it to be bizarre because he's paying me to teach me how to perform and write poetry. He was working on a musical called Bringin' the Noise, Bringin' the Funk. So he would take me to rehearsals with him and we would just sit down and he would introduce me to the iambic pentameter of telling stories. So ta-da, ta-da, ta-da, ta-da, ta-da, right, that meter? That's how Air Jordans is written. My Air Jordans costs 100 with tax, my suede started his jacket, says Raiders on the back, right? And so he started to help me understand this thing called verbal measure and tonal consideration. And I started to learn how to really land poetry into the ear so that all audiences understand what I'm saying, right? All audiences, because the theater does not look like me. The world of the theater don't have like, you know, there aren't Puerto Ricans and blacks, just I'm just, you know, in the world of theater as an audience. But so my job, he would teach me, he said, your job is to transcend whatever voice you have, you should be able to keep the authenticity of that world, but you should be clear in front of your audience because the theater is not you. And so I started to learn with him, and at one point he introduced me to other talents and I started chasing them around. I chased this guy named Ethridge Knight. He was a wonderful, wonderful talent, but he wasn't alive, so I chased his family down for chapbooks that he had. And I flew out to Indianapolis to meet them. And, you know, they had all these writings because I wanted to become a better writer. And eventually that's pretty much how my career blossomed and then how I ended up on deaf poetry was as a theater poet, not a slam poet. So I just wanted to share that journey before I jump into a lot of poetry. Is that all right if I just jump into a lot of poetry? Cool? All right, so thank you for listening to the journey of Lemon Anderson and his trip to the world of theater. All right, this is for the students of Roger Williams. The last poem that I put you at the end. You talk to your poems like they're children because they like to skip on you, you know? Why are you skipping on? Do they need to hear you? Do they need to hear you? That's why you have table contents, there we go. Animal Kingdom here. You don't want me to find you today. You're everywhere, I go to bed with you. It's personal. Ah, here you are. You weren't called that, you were called nerves. Okay, this poem's called Nerves. Anxiety sucks. Megatron teabags because it usually comes from the bad echoes of a driven heart from a lawless ambition, from the suffering of strong will. Life becomes scarred with walk the plank nerves even while you sleep. Fighting a hereditary disorder, you have to order to the corner of the room. Shame. Most of us have it, but rather drop a pill than drop a dime. The chemical vodka and milk mixed in your brain, having a mind of their own, beating your heart like a speed bag, sparring in the ring of why me. Which short inhales of Hail Mary's large, betwixt lungs and all you're doing is sitting down trying to enjoy the sun. Caffeine becomes the enemy of whatever promised land. Worry anchors you down to the moat in his dark lake, gives your steel pride a copper colored phobia. Paper bags work better than hugs. Xanax, no water please. Prozac takes too long to kick in. Being in the emergency room is better for the lightening under your skin. The therapist who shows up too late just tells you something you already googled and gmailed to your journal. But be reminded in the tortoise and hair race of your thoughts that you are not the only, the lonely, no matter how much even crowds of two shorten your breath. No matter how much you miss population, you have to learn to love your solitary confinement even if it palpitates your tikka like Mexican jumping beans, pulls the cool out of you. Stripped searches you of your genuine smile, makes your uglies feel public, breaks down your cojones and make them feel like lentil. Be reminded that you are normal. Your idols suffer from the same defects. It is those stubborn rattlesnakes that make their art divine. Those same cryptic complexes that make up a performance and not an act. Those same tragedies behind the crescent comedies that make it magic. Even the gifted are cursed. The poor and spirit wealthy with rich flaws. Being good comes with the price. Being great comes with the bounty. You have what they call a champion sound. Being a one hit wonder is not good for your soundtrack. So you panic with your cold snare and limited drum samples always living like there's a beat missing called the big easy for my kid. The hardest part about my writing is keeping a pamper on a two year old. Every morning while the plot thickens, hey, did you just pee on the floor? You are a princess and princesses don't pee on the floor. Staring at me with those lake watered colored eyes, sucking on a baby bottle, she pulls it out, burps the smell of puppy water into the sky, tells me in her baby slang, I'm not a princess. I'm a monster, dear artist. If you want to feel like you are the only one, you are in the wrong business, son. It takes a village. Donya, I love to make old Spanish women laugh like this. Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, sangano. For my father, a Vietnam veteran gifted with poetry and story drafted away to the war, left me a letter before he passed to see his Lord, how ashamed he was to let his only son down. The war left him Cambodian scars and tablespoon epilepsy yet nothing compared to the weight of his heart when his child walked him through the doors at Calvary. I miss the man dearly. The Nick games I owed him next to Spike Lee court side. My wonderful white boy of a pops wasn't around long enough to make me fall in love with the Mets, but I root for them just for him, behind closed doors. I always wanted to ask, please tell me why? Out of all the women he saw fire in my mother when she would have beat him with its own rib for staring at another lady crossing the brookner. These are the real rear view mirror envies. I have something sometimes wishing for his blue eyes he never gave me, how the cameras would wrap around the soul of the marbles deep in dialogue, but I have to settle for his paper heart. My mother's iron blood, the love I have for counting words in the lyrics of our songs comes from him, a red hook private who sits in the empty seat at the theater every now and then to watch his son fight for the E in Anderson. I'm just gonna bring you some funny ones. Oh, this is something my father told me before he left. He said to me, don't marry a Puerto Rican woman if you are not willing to die for her because she will kill you anyway, but better to have loved and lost even if it's your own life. Another one, very short. You mean to tell me you left her because she was crazy, crazy enough to be with you when she doesn't have the words to speak but was truly deep in her soul when she is too busy taking care of her babies while her friends enjoy the freedoms of sex, drugs and rock and roll, when she locks herself away with a cigarette and tears to finally find some peace of mind, no one will tell her that there is a beautiful struggle written in between the lines, pops. Today I told my daughter, heaven, who did not have a great relationship with a teacher this year, you know heaven, sometimes your enemies in the streets become your best friends in jail. She looked at me like I was crazy, never mind. Blessed is a man who has found his work in one woman of love for my wife. She smelled of Downey and fried chicken and I thought, via, you must be Puerto Rican but you look Dominican, good, even better. This red woman of mine stamped with the Marci address made up of no makeup, no nail polish, just clear diamond Broadway strip mall lip gloss and storefront liquor eyes. Such a housing project stare. Always ready to roll back into the left at every, hey, ma, yo, yo, ma. I noticed there wasn't a lot of conquest in her blood. Her people must have hidden the mountains when the raids were going down. She told me she was into funny looking white boys so I got lucky. When I saw her hands, I thought about Bill Withers at Carnegie Hall. I knew from that spring morning in the Dutch county of Havami in Southwarth, I found the Donya that was going to bury me. The lady in the lake. Back then when her friends asked her, why him? She knew one day forever they will ask, does he have a brother? When her mother told her the poets, they don't take care of their children. Her mother winks back now with a pair of tickets for every opening night. This red woman has done more in my life than the coffee park phoenix who gave birth to me. She has brought to the world children that stubborn velvet heart of heaven who makes me wanna kill every boy that looks like Justin Bieber. A glowing scrunchy shine who does cartwheels at the dinner table in the gem of our ocean, our baby of the baby girls who hides our keys in places the boogie man wouldn't go and destroys our alone time. It's been two years and we still haven't kicked out of the bed. No matter how painful the labor as this red woman will give me more if I so beckon what's not paid back in riches is paid back and flooded in wealth of this rare dream I live to love every day. If I conscript this lady risk her life to save her father from his only fear of losing work to the dark days of dialysis, she walks around with one kidney so he can smile again. Folks always ask me how I cross over the live word hustle into the biggest brightest lights. Well, ask this lady of mine who buries me in her chest and tells me I am possible to the stars in the room. You think you are beautiful till you get to Hollywood and you find out everyone's beautiful. You think you are talented till you go to New York and you find out everyone is talented. You finally look in the mirror and find out everyone is not you. You bank on that. So can I use this board as the possible? I wanna talk to you guys about character driven poetry. Shakespeare. One of the things that I had to deal with telling my story, a staged memoir, was interviewing family members who wanted me to tell their version of my story, right? If anyone has a solo show and you wanna tell a story about your life, I'm going to warn you now. Do not ask family members what was the story like growing up with your mother or whatever because they're gonna tell you their version so that they're the star of your show. And more than likely you probably might get sued if you get it correct. So we had to deal with that. John Leguizamo had to deal with that. His family going against him. So I wanna show you kind of, before I introduce you to some of the characters in my world, I wanna show you how I developed them. For you writers and actors, inspiring poets. Character driven poetry was always fascinating about it. You know, A.J. Jordan's is a character driven poem. And I was always fascinated with telling the perspective of a story from the character's point of view, like living in the character and having it rhyme. So one of the phases I went through in my life, I had a girlfriend at a really young age. Her name was Susan, but I found Susan to be a boring name in theater. I like Lily. So I gave her the name Lily. And Lily means Susan in Hebrew if you don't know that. So it worked out. So what we did with Lily, first of all, and I tell kids this all the time when I teach high schools, is sometimes the people you wanna write about are really boring, right? The people who you find fascinating in your world end up becoming like really boring on stage. And so what I had to do with Lily is I had to heighten her because basically her voice was very like, hi, how are you? But she played a big role in my life and my mistakes as a teenager. So I took Lily, right? And I tried to tell, and I went and I searched for her voice. And what's interesting is that I found a girl on the train. And the girl on the train, she was getting all this attention and I didn't know why. So I kind of zoomed in on her. This was a train going over the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I know you missed it if I mentioned that. Any New Yorkers who take that train. I don't know if you ever taken a train or you were Manhattanite. No? Okay, okay. So this girl was on the train and I was in search for the voice of this person because I needed to entertain the audience. And this girl, the way she got people to just stare at her is that everything she said spoke like this. Everything was like that. You know, when I talk to you, you know this boy tried to talk to me the other day and I was like, you ain't talking to me like that. Right? And everyone just couldn't stop. Listen to her, everyone was like, that is the language that I'm going to give Lily. Right? What was great about it was how do I connect Lily to a poetic language? I just can't make her ignorant. You don't want to do that to your characters, right? You don't want to just put them out there in front of the world because, again, you're responsible for these voices in your community. So I gave her a simile voice. So everything instead of saying like this, like that, it was like this, like that, but in similes. So how Lily would be like, so I started to play with the notion of, and Lily is like, so you know, like I've been through a lot, like I see these little girls zoning around acting like grown women, dressing like grown men. My mother would have like beat my ass like mommy did, so she called me acting like that, like the time when my first love, this boy from the courtyard, like nobody like wanted to like let their daughters have anything to do with like boys, like let alone like those that came out of that building because it was like the neighborhood of New Jack City. But there was this one boy I like, forget about it anyway. Right? Right? So that's, yeah, you know, it's another way of heightening the characters and giving them texture. And yet they come from these like worlds that you might find ignorant, but they're not because if you really look, they actually have poetry in their language. And I found that she was off, she was loaded with similes. Right? That's another thing. Now, part of the journey as a solo performer, and what I learned is that characters in solo shows help you take a break. When a character shows up in a solo show, it's no longer you telling the story, it's the character helping you to tell the story. So when Lily shows up, we all take a break, right? And now Lily's telling a story, even though you see the same person, the same Lemon Anderson on stage, he is now playing Lily, right? And that also helps give breath to an hour and a half show. And you need that. Because some of you guys feel like you can just run through it telling your story and you just need dynamics constantly. And so what Lily gets to do is she gets to tell the story. Now I'm gonna, is it right if I do similar Lily like for you? If I do her? And I want you to see that she picks up the show, she picks up the story really well. This is great for the girls in the room in case you're looking for a monologue. So I want you to catch Lily telling the story instead of Lemon actually telling his own story. So, oh, you gotta meet my girl Lily. Like, Lily's not around, but Lily was so similar to Lily. Like, Lily was always speaking similar Lily's like, like, like, you know, like I've been through a lot. Like I see these little girls running around acting like grown women, dressing like grown men. My mother would have like beat my ass like Maheri Deerish if she called me acting like that, like the time of my first love. This boy from the courtyard, like nobody like wanted to like let their parents have anything to do with like boys. Like let alone like those that came out of that building because it was like the neighborhood of New Jack City, but there was this one boy, I like forget about it anyway. For like my 14th birthday, my mother got me a pair of these construction timbs I like and my father got me like a see-through beeper. So you know, hip hop, like you could look ugly but clothes make you look like the shit. So like I go out to Margaritas, which is like the corner of Bodega, where like my cousin sent me to show off and act like I was buying sunflower seeds and a Chico stick. And like we run into the two, three, four boys from the courtyard. So like my cousin's semi sister was already like going out with Ray Reston Peace, who was hugging the corner like a drug dealer with his homeboy they called Lemahead. And he looked like a thug doubt Campbell soup kid. So like next thing you know, like this little white boy Porter Rock runs up on me like a chain snatch and pulls my beaver from my mud jeans, which always made my booty look like a Dominican before she has kids anyway. Like he didn't want to give me back my beeper until I gave him the digits. Like my number's so naive instead of giving him my number. I like giving him my virginity. I mean, he had to like hold on to my head to like get it in, but we'll get to that later. My mother didn't like his reputation. She thought I would like catch AIDS from just kissing him because like his mother had it. So I like had to break up with him. But then I became, but then he became my boyfriend again. But like only over the phone for like a year. And he would tell me how to live with his uncle because like there was no way else for him to go. And like his mother didn't want him to do that. And like his uncle like taking his father's mother and death money and spending it on coke all the time. So he had to get like a real job at this place called Goldman Sachs, being a messenger down on Wall Street. Andy, whose gang started growing wild like stretch marks on a baby mama penny line. And like he was going crazy too with them. So one time I was like bored and I wanted to feel like a gang's his girlfriend. So I told him this boy blue chip who had a front tooth like a lapis lazuli in school grabbed my ass like a man handle and he didn't do nothing to him. I got so mad at him because like no girl wants to be with a puzzle until the day he called blue chip hanging out with his girlfriend, holding hands and they would win each other's sneakers. Like who the fuck does that anyway? Like Andy came over and just knocked them out. I heard he like hit blue chip so hard he was still laying on the floor holding his girlfriend's hand. Andy stepped to me and was like, don't worry about when I do things as long as I do them right. And I was like, that's my character driven poetry. One thing I want to share with you is the kind of process I have for sequence writing, right? I want to teach you something interesting about how to connect poems into a story. So you cover like a good 10 minute range of the same story, right? Is that cool? Watch this. So you're born somewhere, right? You're born somewhere. So that's one, two. It's the process of how I write. So these are basically the structure in which I would have to tell the story, right? Now how I cover this ground, it's simple. And I want to share this because again, the solo show is pretty fascinating to me. And what you do is you cover, you cover these worlds with geography. I said this earlier. Sorry, I kind of wanted to remind you about what we were working on today. Let me take this out. What we were working on today. And the process of County of Kings, which is a solo show, is pretty much written like this. It's all done in this kind of sequence, right? It's like geography, history and economy is how I paint each world. And then I decide for this one to show up in a rhyme. I was saying this earlier and I wanted to just kind of repeat it. This one would be a more prose narrative. This one similarly will be character driven. Mother passing would be musical. And poetry reading would be more of a dismount rhythm. So I basically would see a show this way, right? So I would break it into five sections first and then I would start to split it apart. Now, the reason why I keep stressing geography, history and economy is because I was taught that from Regi Gaines that that's how you really transcend work. That's how you really get the audience to buy into your world. Because anybody in the front row has ever been to Brooklyn? Yeah? Been to Brooklyn? You've been to Brooklyn? Okay, what side of Brooklyn have you been to? Bushwick, the new Bushwick or the old Bushwick? Okay, East Williamsburg, you know. So there's a, but there are different versions. There's a famous rapper named Jay-Z. Anyone know who Jay-Z is? Okay, Jay-Z's version of Brooklyn is very different from mine, all right? And so how do I paint a picture that transcends that world that no one's familiar with about Brooklyn, right? I didn't grow up in Marcy Projects with Jay-Z. I grew up in Park Slope. And in order to make Park Slope look like it's real, it's very hard, right? And my job is to paint that picture. And so what I was saying in the masterclass earlier is that I was taught this, that as long as you have geography, economy, and history playing in the storytelling, it starts to open up. And it's the same thing. And then you change the rhythm. So this is how you capture it and then you add a rhyme to it so that it falls great on the ear, right? So that the rhyme scheme lands. And then you change it up on the second piece and then dance to the Himalaya which you heard with my mother, right? So that the Himalaya is now told in prose. So if I go watch me in my 19 and I start bobbing like this and then the next piece I pull off and I start to slow it down. So the audience is like, okay, no more rhyming. No more rapping, please. My ears need a break, right? That's important for me to know. And for us as performers, it's to be responsible to our audience as we're telling stories. So basically this is the structure in which I tell stories. I'm always painting the picture like with this. This is the famous way to paint pictures for me. And then I just change up the rhythms. And I ride you through and I exhaust you, okay? Great. All right, just wanted to share that. Any questions? Can we break into a Q and A? I could really, yeah. You wanna do that? And then I could read some poetry and we could finish it off. Is that all right? Awesome. Thank you. Questions? Poets? Yes. So you said you write at three and do you write for a certain amount of time or is it structured in that way or does it depend on the day? 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning. It's the best day of the week. I live in New York City, right? And I live deep in the city. I live in Bushwick. And there's a world coming home at that time, right? 3 a.m. is when the night, the children of the night come home, right? And those are my stories. That's why I think Q and A's work, because this is great. Look, there are adult dancers coming home at that time, sometimes five in the morning. And so I prepare my writing by, first I read a script, right? I have a script in my hand. I'm fascinated by script writing because I find it just to be character-driven and extremely well-written as far as description of a scene, right? Because in order to write a really great script, you have to describe the scene before you enter it with dialogue. As that's happening, the windows open outside. And things are happening, you know, the late night. And then the city shuts down around 3.34. And that's quiet time. And that's quiet time to think about whatever the deadline is for me as a writer because I'm a project-based writer now. So I'm trying to knock out the writing and I finish around 1 p.m., right? So I go from 3 to 1 p.m. And then I almost look like I don't have a job at all. Because sometimes people see me at 1 p.m. and they go, what do you do for a living? And he's just out during the day. But usually I go and I pick up my kids. But 3 a.m. to 1 p.m. is the time. Then I come back and I take phone calls from like 4 to 6. And then I go back into writing from 6 to 9.30. So that's the process. And I love it. It's wonderful to have that regimen, yeah. Talked about like a lot of different types of art but one thing that we haven't really talked about too much is I feel like just hip-hop in general and just like that rap culture. I think you can definitely translate the poetry that we've talked about into that. But I think of your poem, Gangsta MCs, that you did for Deaf Poetry. And you had this one line that was, hip-hop was always about the rusted fork trying to eat like a silver spoon. Can you possibly like maybe talk about the ideas behind that poem and like what you were trying to capture? So the poem was called Gangsta MCs. When I was on Deaf Poetry Jam, I was the only poet who approached Russell Simmons as a contributing writer. Every other poet will come in with a poem already set. I would ask Russell Simmons and Stan Lathan who were the producers of the show, what do you want? It's a show. There's something missing, there's a poem missing whether it's a love poem. And Russell Simmons, one season, said to me, these guys keep dissing my rappers, you know? And that's basically how Gangsta MCs happen. So Russell was getting heat from the poetry community that his rappers suck, right? Because the poets, you know, the poets of, you know, the rebels, they speak their mind. And Russell was getting all this heat and his argument was, well, why am I getting all this flack about my rappers when I'm giving the poets jobs? And I said, all right, all right. You want me to write something? And Malcolm Jamoel Warner, everyone knows who Malcolm Jamoel Warner is? Malcolm Jamoel Warner jumped on stage one day and he had a thesis on hip-hop culture and I thought he is not qualified to talk about hip-hop culture. So I basically wrote a piece called Gangsta MCs and it's very dated. Because my feelings have changed and I've gotten older and now I'm like, I don't know if I agree with that piece anymore, which is why I don't read it. But people love it and people respond to it but it's definitely a voice I could disagree with. And the rusty fork trying to eat like the silver spoon is, you know, I stand behind that because growing up in New York City and when you look out your window and you watched your community dancing in the street because they weren't allowed a Studio 54. They weren't allowed in these clubs growing up. You know, you couldn't just go to a famous nightclub in New York City and get in. You just weren't allowed in. So we had to make our own party outside in the street. So we hooked up to the lamppost. We put our radios and connected them with our boom boxes or our house speakers to the lamppost and we created our own party. Out of that, you know, the DJ became the rapper. So the DJ was the first element of hip-hop. He was the guy that said, hey ho, ho, hey, and then he got tired from scratching because now he had to scratch that someone else took the mic and that the person that took the mic became the official hype man rapper and then they started battling each other and hip-hop came from a battle first. I saw all that out of my window as a kid. It was fascinating because now it's like the greatest music culture in the world, right? Isn't it like the most dominant culture in the world? And sometimes you feel bad for the pioneers because you know what pioneers are the first to be seen, last to be heard, you know? So, up next. Something you said in the poem about your time in prison was it was like a really interesting metaphor of the lollipop kid plucked from the rabbit's fur. I like really wanna know where you got that and what that means to you because it was super interesting you may have really stuck with me. Well, I looked like a lollipop kid when I was a kid. You know lollipop kids in Wizard of Oz? I had a, I grew into my head, I think. So, I have a Nordic head, you know? On a Puerto Rican body. And they used to call me lollipop. I had so many names, I kept lemon. That's how it worked, right? But lollipop kid is how I looked, right? So, you could imagine this kid that looks like that in a prison cell. Cause even when I stepped out of my cell, the black guys were like, what the hell are you, right? I mean, this is who I was, right? And I would walk out and be like, damn, I got to push ups, right? And dead rat, and the cloth of dead rabbits was the old New York, you know, the gangs of New York. There was a gang called Dead Rabbits. And so I come from the tradition of gang culture in New York. So it's one of those hidden kind of coded stuff that the cloth of a dead rabbit, the cloth of an old gang. So that's, you know, Campbell's soup kid who wears that dead rabbit is, I don't know, I thought the image was cool. I liked it. Shakespeare would have loved it. Hand here. Here you go. What advice would you give for aspiring poets or aspiring artists that feel that their voice can't be heard or is being ignored or in others ways, just like sort of struggling? Yell loudly. Well, all right. One of the things about poetry and poets is that we need to become musicians about our art. We need to read more work. We need to study other artists, study other poets. Unfortunately, you can run into a poet and say, is who are you reading? And they couldn't quote anyone. You do that to a musician, a saxophone player in jazz, and they'll tell you, oh, man, I'm listening to Dizzy Gillespie, man, I'm listening to Art Tatum, man. And you know, it's like, poets for some reason don't do that. If you don't do that, you're not going to be able to shape your work well enough for it to even have the integrity to be heard, because greatness transcends. You get it? Greatness transcends. When you're really good, everyone hears you. You just know how to be heard, because you've taken from so many of the other artists that know how to be heard. I come from a world where we studied poets. When I was being mentored by Reggie Gaines, I was not allowed to walk in the room if I don't have another poet's poem memorized. So I had Willie Perdomo memorized. I had Mikey Pinier will memorize. I had Lucky Sin Fuego. I would come into the room, and he was just building me up to be an artist. That's what he was working on. He was training me to be an artist. And all artists study art form. Poets don't, for some reason. So it's all about self-expression, when you should actually learn how to understand other people's work. If you have musicians' other material memorized, it's going to show up in your voice, and all of a sudden, you're going to be clearer. Does that make any sense? And also, you can always steal a lot. Yes. I would like to just ask you about the legacy, because you mentioned Mickey Miguel Pinierdo and Willie Piniermo, and I know where they come from. I know where you come from. Can you talk about that legacy real quick about where these poets that you're reading from, where they come from, and how they affected you being from where you're from? Well, the New York Rican poets have a poetry cafe, which there aren't any New York Rican's in it anymore. But that's fine. New York Rican poets that's located in Alphabet City, known as the Lower East Side, there was a tradition of black culture Latinos. Really, that's what it was. It was like they were disowned by their parents because they were too black for their homes. So these Latinos, mainly Puerto Ricans in New York, they were disowned by their family for being too hanging out with the brothers. And you had no choice because the black community and the Puerto Rican community had the same struggle. So they looked at each other like, hey, we're going through the same thing here. We might as well join up together and create parties and hang out and get high together. And then the parents looked down on that. And one of the things about Latino culture, which I'm still trying to figure out, is the internal racism that happens in Latino culture. How black Latinos are racist against black people. And you look black. It's my father-in-law, anyway. So that culture created this voice called New Yorkan. The New Yorkan voice is a black culture Latino that sounds like this, but he moves like a black guy. And out of that came Mikey Pinheiro, who wrote Short Eyes, one of the greatest plays about prison especially, and the kind of fear and the internal kind of nightmare of prison. Because that's a very real play, if you read it. And yet, he also came from there. Pedro Pietri came from there. Willy Perdomo came from there. All these great poets. You see how I'm dropping all these great poets? I know these poets, and these poets inform me as a musician of my art form that these voices are alive, and I can use these voices to make a better Lemon Anderson. And I'm in the tradition of New Yorkan poets. I follow the tradition of New Yorkan poets. I barely know anyone who knows that stuff. Any poets, I don't know any young poets who know New Yorkan poetry like that. And then there's a great book called Aloud. If you're looking for a great poetry book, it's called Aloud, Voices from the New Yorkan Poets Cafe, right? Awesome, it's a great book. Yeah, cool. Want to finish with some? We've got one more, and then we'll finish with some poem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll do some poetry. Hi. Earlier, you talked about your experience with me. Yo, Lemon. I'll tell you about that, too. That's a great name. Thank you. You talked about your experience with ballet and how it was an escape for you. What was your other attraction to it? Or was there more of an attraction to ballet than just an escape? It was an escape from poverty, right? And I don't mean poverty like no money. I mean poverty like ignorance. We'll talk. I mean, people with ignorance is bliss. That's true, too. But it's also, I was exposed to a new world. And being in the felled ballet, I had new friends. And I went back to the neighborhoods in the ghettos, and they went to their homes on the Upper West Side. But we had one thing in common, which is excellence in the room. And we shared that. And I always wanted to reach for that. And I've always felt like I wanted that vibe. It's not just like I wanted to strive for excellence. I wanted to be back in the room when people appreciated just trying to do something better with themselves and the body. And I was always a good dancer. As a kid, my mother took me out to Cyphers in Corny Island, as you've seen. And I danced really well as a kid. I just had a knack for it. And so that connection to feeling like I'm doing something right, everybody wants that. It's called glory. Cool? All right, let me read some poetry. Is that cool? So this is the day I came home. And you know, what's funny about the time I spent in prison, I felt like I did like nine months in that time. And I felt like I did five years. So I came out talking like a prisoner. You know, all these big words I never used before. So guys come out, they read one book and they think they know it all right. So let me bring you into that. They offered me a year or five years probation. I take the year with no hesitation. I'm not built to be checking in, pissing in a cup. Curfew's telling me what I do is and what I does, where I'm supposed to be and where I was. I'd rather do a year. Hopefully, good time will get me up early out of here. But man, I got to make it clear. I ain't about to show these suckers that my heart pumps fear. What you looking at? Let's take it to the yard. I ain't no quad, boy. I know I only got a year, but I'll spend the rest of my life in here flinging your ass off the top tier. Damn, I only got to do a year. These 25 to life is going to try to have me washing the doo-doo out their jockeys. I got to balance my mouth, be bold and not cocky, no Apollo Creed, but all rocky. An officer comes to the gate to get me and brings me to another cell for pedigree. In the distance, I can see a large black man, a hard rock. His hairline looks like it always has a bad day. His dreaded salt and peppered beard means he comes from a 5% nation. Now, hard rock was known not to take no shit from nobody, and he had the scars to prove it. Split purple lips, ears lumped up, permanent pomegranate above his yellow eyes. And on the side, he had a buck 50 straight up that slammed into his taped up, shaped up 1989 blowout, no doubt. See, you don't know what I'm talking about. Cause I was one of the few who spoke to hard rock before I came out. That night, we broke night, and in the midst of a prison chat, he tells me that, listen here, young mighty Joe. You don't need to come in this prison no more, and adolescent down the whole years, I'm man, hard rock. What you lying for? Fuck you. Listen here, young mighty Joe. There's a better place to fight your time. Stay away from the colors, school brown, project blue, red lines on the floor, red lines on the floor, red lines on the floor, they're there to institutionalize you. Come here, go back. Come here, you know what they say? They say, they say, they say, they say, they say, if the walls could talk what they do. I put layers and layers of paint and stucco in wallpaper, but they keep speaking to me in these $10 words. They say, they say, they say, they say, they say, why go home when you got three hots in the car? Why I think, be live outside the box, we're in the box. You could do nothing wrong, nothing right, can't tell day from night. The walls ask me where I wanna be. I say right here with you, two times. And just like that, hard rock went walking through them doors, handcuffed and shackled, making a rhythm out of his chains. And on the other side of his head, you could see the scar where the doctor's used to cut out a part of his brain. The haunting of turning up that way, a knot hole in the fence keeps me up, staring through the barred windows. In the distance, I could see a hill. Over the hill, there was a place filled with boot camps, morning PTs, no red lines on the floor, creased greens instead of project blues, runs around Rikers Island. The warden offers me a programming and I sign up for high impact boot camp. It feels like a punk chess move from the outside, a sucker strategy. But after listening to hard rock, I owe it to the choice you should have made. Plus, it ain't like I gotta listen to anyone. Anderson, get your suspicious mulatto ass on the floor right now and give me 50 push-ups and there better be the Bruce Lee con. Then I want you to run to the corner of the sprung. Stick your face in the corner, yell 10 times, discipline is a willful obedience to all lawful orders, respect for authoring and suffer lies. And if you don't end it on sir, every time you say it, I will double up. You goddamn hear me and when you're done, I need you to come back here and do work detail, maggot. And you better have them floors polished to Broadway. Looks like a glass lake. You call those Bruce Lee push-ups. If I would have known you was gonna Bruce Leroy, those push-ups, I would have told you to kiss my converse. Get up, listen boy, chin up. Everybody else here platoon is sentenced to this program for violating parole. You on the other hand chose to be here. You chose this program so with officer Brown, drill instructor, if you give one shit, I will give back to you, hear me? And that sir, yes sir. Now get to the corner of the sprungs and run it. After two months of boot camp, they stick me back in population right out my time. I look weird to the rest of the inmates in my cell block. I know it's because I don't look comfortable being here. I don't care about phone time. I don't care about stacking day room chairs, can't stand the sight of these men wasting their time playing meaningless games of spades, fighting over a television they don't own, killing over a meal they ain't make, not me. No way. You won't catch me smiling on Rikers Island. I'm finna hold on to my discipline. I'm a pray harder than the in-house preacher, outweigh the prison law librarian, keep hospital corners in my bed to feel normal. I'ma lock myself, sit on a stack of books and read. How Steve Beko died so we can write what we like. How Hajj Malik Shabazz passed, now they think twice before they whoop I ask. Cause of Jackson George, we deserve to see the sky cause if you look real close, you could see blood in my eye. I can't rely on the school system, false education they sold me. But we can rely on American history. Lies my teacher told me, stick my face in the books, cause my habits to read by force. And behold, I see a pale white horse. Cause in the books is all the answers that I seek. Wonder why my mother was stronger than my father read the feminine mystique. You hate the man, but not as much as you should hate the man that hate your sister, but you don't know real hate to your read mind conf by Adolf Hitler. You don't know the rules of power, believe me I'm not convinced. You know white lies, white lies, you know as Nicolo Machiavelli, Prince Attica, Attica, Attica. I run into a poem written by a three-time felon about how his cold heart would bake warm cookies at the sight of seeing his first love again. I wish I could have wrote that one. Every day I look out towards the New York City skyline out in the prison yard and I count the wakeups till I face the ultimate haiku. The worst thing about doing a bit in prison is coming back home. So boom, right? I come back home. I head outside, hit the middle entrance of the courtyard hoping for someone in the past to walk by so I could drop some fresh knowledge. You know, everybody needs a gym or two. Anything more than that is gonna run you two cans of octopus and a bag of rice and beans, so boom, check it. One of my friends, Windog, passes by and asks me how's everything and I'm like, all right, I'm comprehending, I'm comprehending. You know knowledge yourself? He starts looking at me strange like, word, yeah, you look like you put on some weight and I'm like, yeah, there's a necessity for it. Okay, did you learn your lesson? It's not what I learned, it's what I gained. See, I'm a mirror image of the generation that is to come. I did everything looking for acceptance because I didn't have acceptance at home. It's ostentatious. Windog looks at me like, homie, you are six away from a six pack. Hey, isn't that your girl across the street? I'm like, nah, my brother? I'm thinking right now in the immediate. And then there's a familiar smell in the air. Designer in pasta perfume, mixed with the cooked smell of just for me, hair relaxer always equals Lily. There she go. My first day out, she's across the street in the arms of a rival. One of my enemies from the Fifth Ave boys, her skirt raised half a foot higher than when I left her. Her hair died of red manic panic. Picture me back to going to Southern Wind. That's the city. She says, man, you don't throw your turn crazy. I'm like, yeah, it's a possibility but not a probability. You can't go from Guatemala to Guadalpean. See, but what I learned is that Picasso lives amongst us. He's just in prison, being deprived of his expression and deprivation. That's why crime doesn't pay. Now, all I need is a job. So, yeah, basically that's the story of when I came out. I came out with all these books but I didn't know how to use the words. I was so well read and, you know, I was just using the words everywhere I went. I was like, you know, expressing all that. Like I just read the dictionary. You got to see what I know. And it's like, my friends were not buying into it. You know, they were just like, nah, man, we're just hanging out, you know. So I'm going to read some more poems and then we're going to call it. Is that cool? Awesome, all right. This is dedicated to my life in the theater around my friends again. Growing up, my homies would say to me after rooftop cipher, yo, son, where you going? Man, I'm going to see Shakespeare in the park. What the fuck is that, yo? Man, it's just a bunch of fools rapping about their world. That's all cool, yo, be careful. As a child, when I saw Dorothy close her eyes and whisper loudly, there is no place like home. I didn't understand that word home. Till I saw the warriors make it back to Corny Island, then I knew what she was talking about. Growing up, I always thought impossible was short for the word I impossible. So when people told me no, that's impossible, I took it as faith. Dear Nelson Mandela. As an 80s baby from New York, I remember the day you were liberated from a South African prison and made your way to the States. You took a pit stop in Bed-Stuy during a time when this neighborhood was one of the most dangerous places in the world, but that was a sign that your heart has always been on the front line. As you make your transition to meet your maker, I just want to put it out there that we recognize your presence and we owe you a statue at Boys and Girls High School dipped in bronze and mad love for showing up for us when no one would dare step foot on Fortin Street. Madiba. Dear Detroit, take your New Yorkers back, they need you. All right, for the poets. Last one. I love everything about the world of poets, the flaws of new poets trying to find their flow, the unlicensed critics smashing the pop culture poets, the nerd bad two step poets breaking character in their focus, priceless, the internationally known, locally rejected poets who teach us about the world in 4D when books put too much hurt on the eyes, the liberals still holding on to Mumia. It's called front line loyalty, take notes, the young poets with their one sided Bay Area style that they only understand, but they're a million deep so get over it. The poets using spoken words to land a record deal. Somebody's listening to them. The erotic poets who go down on a one night stand. I live vicariously through you. The poets with a hundred gods and the ones who believe you can find a God and a Bazooka Joe comic strip. The gay poets and their straight parents who have no choice but to love them or eat shit. The poets who have nine to five jobs who don't wanna do magic tricks and backflips just got something to say so say it baby. The captain save them poets. Don't touch their mentorship money because that pays for chapbooks and hobo traveling. The baby mother poets in their shot finally being loved randomly. The slam poets who go for each other's caskets at finals but they are each other's pole bearers when it's all said and done. When the pen is finally finished, when the page and the last poet is called on stage. We owe we got. Thank you. Thank you very much. Lemon Anderson. Thank you so much for sitting with me and appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. We have some books for sale and thank you again Lemon. Thank you.