Alex Lemon Reading From Memoir “Happy” In Minneapolis

Alex Lemon could not have picked two nastier nights to visit the Twin Cities than Thursday, January 7 and Friday, January 8. I was highly impressed when about 40 people showed up at Magers and Quinn Booksellers on Thursday night to hear Alex Lemon read from his memoir, “Happy.”

This was a picture before the event took place.

While I was more interested in Alex Lemon’s poetry than in this memoir, I tried to do some quick reading of Happy in the hopes of finding something interesting and having something intelligent to say. I grasped that while Happy is officially a memoir, it’s also a great excuse for vivid images also found in Lemon’s poetry. The early part of Chapter 1 has “I felt like I had drank a can of Drano, snorted a bag of glass and leapt off the roof.” If that doesn’t get your attention, well, you’re just not paying attention!

A gentleman from Magers and Quinn came out and gave a little talk about the people speaking there in the upcoming days. Alex Lemon came out and started talking to the group. He read the Prologue, a good bit of Chapter 1, and a couple of sections later in the book. The room thought that Chapter 1 was pretty funny, especially the line “You should really do something about your ugly face.”

The last time I was at a reading, there was a large book of Bob Dylan photographs behind the poets, as if the Bard of Hibbing was watching over the proceedings. There was an book of Allan Ginsburg’s letters on the top shelf behind Alex Lemon, but Ginsburg looked preoccupied from where I was sitting.

I believe many people will find the efforts made by Lemon’s mother to help Alex through very challenging health issues, to be very inspiring. Lemon would later say in the Q&A that one of the main themes in the book was the relationship between him and Ma.

The other main theme of Happy is the idea of masculinity, the masculine approach to mental illness, and the masculine approach to feelings and writing. Lemon was an athlete and, ahem, a rather hard-partying individual at Macalester, to compensate for his bookish, artistic upbringing.

I was hoping he would read some of his poems during this evening, but it was not to be.

You can see from this photo that more people showed up than were expected, as there were people sitting to the right of the podium.

There were a number of people who asked questions about the difference between writing poetry and writing a memoir. Lemon’s first answer was “It’s really long.” There was some conversations about the editorial process, how Lemon’s editor was relatively mellow. Someone asked if he missed writing poetry while writing Happy. He mentioned that he was writing poems which will appear in his third book of poetry Fancy Beasts (to appear in March 2010) while he was writing Happy, so it’s not like he was deprived. It’s not a big shock that Happy is a very poetic memoir. Someone asked why write a memoir instead of writing poetry. He talked about how poetry and prose are two different ways of cutting to the bone of an issue. Someone asked if he was nervous about what people mentioned in the memoir would think about how they were portrayed, and Lemon said “You can’t control how other people think and feel.”

I was thinking he was going to use a stamp pad to autograph his books, but he seemed to write just fine, if a little scribbly. In Happy, he tries to use voice recognition software, and it doesn’t work very well. I asked him if he still uses it, and he said no, because he’s gotten better at writing, and because the software still doesn’t work very well for him. Between January 2009 and now, he’s gotten to the point where he transcribes the ideas he records on the voice recorder himself. The brain seems to find alternate ways to do things in the event of injury.

I asked him if he knew which of his poems was most beloved by his readers. He didn’t know. I asked if he ever felt like he nailed what he was trying to do in a particular poem. He said “Most of the time when I write a poem, I feel like I’ve hit into a double play, instead of hitting a home run.” He was a catcher on the Macalester baseball team in Happy, so it’s not a big shock that he used a baseball analogy.

The gentleman from Magers and Quinn said Alex Lemon would be signing book copies up at the front of the store, but somehow he never got around to getting there. I believe the gentleman whose book Alex Lemon is signing is an old friend. People kept coming up to the podium for conversations and book signings.

Alex Lemon was very kind and encouraging to me. His advice for aspiring poets was to keep writing, and to read a lot. He told me “I read like a cannibal,” in describing his voracious reading.

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