August, 2004,
AfterEllen.com

by Malindo Lo

Interview with Alix Olson

She recently brought her combination of fierce feminism and queer pride to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, where she performed a rousing set of poems accompanied by guitarist Pamela Means for the opening night celebrations.

An accomplished performer with a gift for connecting with her audience, Alix's sharp-witted humor and inspiring political commentary was a welcome jolt of energy after two days in the rainy Michigan woods. I sat down with her a couple of days later—in the shade of a huge tree after the rain had cleared up—to talk with her about her life, her politics, and her writing.

AfterEllen: The other day when you were performing you were talking about how you had just written this poem because your dad was in the hospital—can you tell me a little bit about your creative process? You write about political topics and you're on the road a lot; do you write on the road?
Alix Olson: I write sort of like in little snippets, pieces, and then I string things together. I can't think of one time where I've actually written a poem all the way through from beginning to end. I think I choose topics when they're politically relevant and I feel like I'm being an activist and I need to—the way you feel like you have to write a speech, you know? And other than that I think I'm inspired by events that happen in my life, like my dad—but even that poem turned out to be pretty political (laughing). And that's because I think I live every moment in my life feeling that it's political.

AE: So you cut your hair...
AO: I cut my hair, I came out, moved to New York, and I started going to the Nuyorican Poets Café. From then on I became hooked up with other political poets and I was doing street performance, street theatre—anti-Nike, anti-sweat shop performance every Saturday. I think the hyper-frenetic energy of New York also contributed somewhat to the quality of my work which is a little bit hyper-frenetic.

AE: When were you in New York?
AO: I moved there after college in 1998, and I've been there ever since— but I just moved to Massachusetts this year. But it's really hard to say that because I just moved, and I still feel like a New Yorker.

AE: How long do you tour?
AO: I tour about 200 days a year.

AE: How do you like touring?
AO: I love it. I'm starting to feel like I want to slow down a little bit, but it's really fed me for so many years; I've been doing it full time for about two–three, I guess three [years]. I was teaching in-between, like whenever I was home I would teach. I was an artist-in-residence at elementary schools, and so I would teach whatever they were learning through poetry. People always ask...I think people can't grasp the fact that you can have a life on the road. But it really is kind of calming in a way, because there is a routine to it. You get in your car, you drive a couple of hours, you get to the hotel, you check in, you do a show. I mean it's pretty boring, you know, the details surrounding the show. The shows themselves are great and you get to meet activists all around the country.

AE: You have a really great fan base.
AO: Yeah, they're really supportive and they're really solid people.

AE: Your second CD came out last year; are you working on a new one now?
AO: We're trying to finish up a DVD project. We're in the final stages of that so I haven't thought about anything else in terms of any CDs, but I'm sure that I will at some point. It's hard financially to put out more than one project at a time. It's a very grassroots—we are very much like everything we take in we put back out into the next project.

AE: What's on the DVD?
AO: It's a two-hour documentary about life on the road and there are about eleven poems as well; you can skip to those.

AE: Are they new?
AO: No; it's documenting what we've done over the past two years.

AE: When does the DVD come out?
AO: I think in about a month; three weeks to a month. We're doing the final editing stage and then we have to duplicate them.

AE: How far ahead do you plan your projects?
AO: I don't plan at all (laughing). I imagine after that we'll tour for a while and try to sell some...and keep writing.

AE: Do you always perform with musicians?
AO: No. Lisa [Vogel, the producer of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival] asked me to perform with musicians on Night Stage because she felt it was a musical stage... I love performing with musicians but it's a very different feel. I feel like I can set my own pace when I'm performing by myself. But it's really exciting to have collaboration too; it gets kind of lonely sometimes doing shows by myself. And generally when I have a longer set with musicians—longer than this one [at Michigan]—there's more time for interaction, talking, and spontaneity.

AE: Who do you feel has influenced you as an artist? You brought your grandmother here which I think is great.
AO: I bring her every year; this is her fourth year.

AE: That's wonderful.
AO: Yeah, my family has been very strong advocates for my work as well as influential in my politics and my political self. Howard Zinn and Michael Moore are two really strong influences. Activists have been stronger influences than artists because I feel like I like to incorporate what I learn into what I do as opposed to what some other people are artistically doing. Ani DiFranco, of course, has influenced a whole generation in terms of doing our own art from the ground up. As a poet, I read a lot of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. And then all kinds of music; I mean I feel influenced just in terms of rhythm and tempo and I always have music on when I'm writing.

AE: Do you write alone?
AO: Yeah, always alone.

AE: So you recently had a birthday; happy birthday.
AO: Yeah, thank you. I'm 29, just like the festival.

AE: I wanted to ask you about your last CD, which had all these great poems about breaking up with someone.
AO: I did.

AE: Are you feeling better now?
AO: (laughing) I feel better, yeah... Even those [poems] to me are politicized because I have very definitive political ideas about how I want to conduct a relationship, and one of those is non-monogamy. And I think that for me is a function of deprivatizing bodies and not privileging romantic relationships over friendships. So, respecting and revering all kinds of relationships. There's such a value placed on the Hallmark sappy love shit that I'm trying to get past... [Nonmonogamy] was something I decided to take on for myself because I didn't want to live in a fearful way, a way of something always being taken from me. It felt very capitalist, like romantic capitalism, like that's mine... I don't really believe people can own each other.

AE: That's a very challenging thing to do.
AO: It's very challenging, and that's what some of those pieces are about (laughs). And ultimately, we ended up breaking up after five years and I think people always blame it on non-monogamy, but I think...it would have ended anyway, so I was kind of trying to deal with the issues of letting someone be free, and letting them go.

AE: And writing is a very cathartic process.
AO: Yeah. And...I've heard feedback that it's been cathartic for other people who've experienced breakups too... I have yet to write a love poem, which is interesting. I have no love poems!

AE: Well, love poems are hard to write.
AO: They are.... Maybe love poems are hard to write because they're current, and breakup poems are already—they're ditched, they're gone. And then of course there are the crush poems and the sex poems, which are sometimes dedicated to people who will never know they're about them. And I feel no need to tell them, really (laughs).

AE: You can announce it now; we'll announce it to the world.
AO: The names of my temporal muses are...

Check out Alix Olson's official website to get her DVD, which is scheduled to be released in September 2004, and for future tour dates.

Described by Ms. Magazine as "a road poet on a mission," Alix Olson is a poet and activist who has been featured on HBO's Def Poetry Jam and was voted the 2004 OutMusician of the Year.

AE: How did you get into this line of work? It's not something you grow up thinking you're going to do.
AO: No, I never thought I should be a full-time poet! It never occurred to me, or my parents. Um—I was an actress, and since I was a little kid I played music and I was a writer, but none of them—they were all kind of separate things. And then I think at some point when I really became actualized in my political self I realized I should be using my training and my background and my—whatever talent there was—to further some political good, or to further social justice. And so I switched from being an actress to being a political performer. I guess how it happened was starting to write my own work and perform it. I was very like, you know, a righteous feminist but I had long hair so I would get these girlie girlie roles, and at some point I thought, "that's so stupid, why am I doing this?"