Austin 360

Seven summers ago, at the Paramount Theatre, Alix Olson did her spoken-word thing, gesturing, crouching and pointing, rapping poetry with a metronomic charge, words spraying like paint from a can to make swooping graffiti spelling out exalted rage.

Olson's performance of "America's On Sale," her poetic screed at capitalist inequities, thrust her Nuyorican Poets' Café slam team to victory during the National Poetry Slam Competition. And right here in Austin, Alix Olson's spoken-word career took off.

Olson, then 24, began touring, playing colleges, bars, cafes and festivals, tooling about the country in a beloved van she named June (after late poet-essayist June Jordan). At one point she was touring 300 days a year.

That number has since dropped, but this spoken-word star with a profoundly feminist, unmistakably lesbian voice still takes it on the road, recording CDs (a third is upcoming) and, last year, filming the tour documentary "Left Lane." The movie is a rambling, funny, foot-stomping, mind-prying journey from city to city with Olson and her musician friends, whose acoustic strums and tom-tom slaps often lay down the beat to her rhythmic recitations.

On Sunday, Olson returns to Austin with director Samantha Farinella to screen "Left Lane" during the Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival. The award-winning movie documents "the search for independent thought, grassroots defiance, passionate connection, organic food and clean laundry," say the filmmakers.

All of which conjures a particular stereotype, an angry, outspoken, persnickety, razor-shy genus ruled by ideology, quick with a slogan and happy to roil the social-political sediment. Their currency is symbolic gestures (spelling history "herstory"), noisy activism (throngy protests) and exploiting the raw force of language (hello, Alix Olson).

But stereotypes are made for smashing, and Olson, now 30, seems to wriggle out of pigeon holes and parry labels, despite flaunting her political biases and megaphoning her "queerness." She dubs herself a "folk poet," and prefers "dyke" to lesbian. With youth on her side, she says her style and writing are following an "evolutionary process." After studying acting in high school and college, Olson moved to New York and started doing street theater to protest Nike sweat shops. Her ire was trained on big, obvious targets — "in general, just The Man," she says.

"My poetry started out that way as well," says Olson from her home in North Hampton, Mass. "It takes getting older to begin seeing grays. I always hated looking at the grays in life, because there is so much plainly wrong with the world that is black and white. But it limits your creativity. My early poetry is way more black and white and less interesting to me now."

If Olson today sics her writing on finer-grained issues, her sophisticated wordplay can make even well-travelled ideas bound and bop. Read this from her poem "Pirates" and you are whipped by the breathless tempo, challenged by the knotty, congested cadences:

So the hypodermic media shoots us up until our brains are entombed, petrified, lying side by side next to our 401(k)s and our SUVs, chain-stored in the chamber of a Wal-Mart mummy freeze

And outside that sarcophagus of American flags and "god blesses," our collective conscience is brought right down to its knees

Praying forgiveness for this nation exporting numbness

For treasure looting the oil, the ozone, the airwaves and the grain

These are our true colors running, and they are running away with everything . . .

There is exhilarated uproar in those words, a galloping run-on demanding wide berth. Picture Olson, this pierced punk pixie, nearly enacting the words onstage with rock-star physicality.

In the performances in "Left Lane," Olson commands but never intimidates. Even when she's channeling the metered fervor of Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce, Ani DiFranco, Chuck D and Jesse Jackson (whom Olson calls "the premier spoken-word artist"), Olson radiates prickly charm. She wears all black. She has shaggy, bottle-blond hair with dark roots defiantly grown out, and huge, immaculate teeth. She lets out curt, girlish gasps between lines of poetry, refueling her lungs for the next blast.

"I like the craft of words," she says. Olson is a laugher, expansive and chipper, a subject with whom a journalist chats about almost everything but the questions he planned. We talk about what kind of pens we like to write with ("Uniball, fine point, but not extra fine. It has to have some meat to it. Always black ink.") and how one of her heroes, Angela Davis, taught at my university.

Olson has been writing all her life, and has always been steeped in political discourse. She grew up in Pennsylvania, where her parents were ex-hippies and political science professors. They brought baby Olson to strikes and protests and meetings. In her poem "Womyn Before," she recalls: "I was still sucking my thumb the first time I sang 'We Shall Overcome.' "

"I knew what we were protesting and I felt that we were right. It made sense," Olson says. "There was a lot of joy in it. It was very powerful and very formative. I remember being little and sitting underneath the table and coloring and listening to heated discussions."

Her writing organically swerved to politics and social topics — race, rape, inequality, misogyny, religion, oil, Bush, the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy and, the poem's title says it all, "Armpit Hair (Mammally Factual)."

She rages, rants, rips. The point is communal release, a gestural salve. "Anger fuels a lot of it," Olson admits. Yet art can wilt without a measure of cheer and the ecstatic. Olson's poetry is streaked with a dark humor that lets in light.

"Spoken-word artists are a very lighthearted, light-spirited, funny community," she says. "There are jokes followed by anger followed by jokes. It's an interesting mix of anger and optimism, and that's why people respond to it."

cgarcia@statesman.com; 445-3649

'Left Lane' with performer Alix Olson and director Samantha Farinella in attendance

When: 7:10 p.m. Sunday

Where: Arbor Cinema, 9828 Great Hills Trail

Tickets: $8-$9, available at the door or in advance

Information: www.agliff.org, 302-9889

Hear me roar

Spoken-word artist Alix Olson calls her craft a mix of anger and optimism.