Poetry is Built Like That
Arts profile, Girlfriends September 2001
by Jess Arndt

Spoken wordster Alix Olson prefers disruption to cynicism.

"Make ‘em blush." That’s what Alix Olson said our writing should do when we enrolled for a poetry class at Wesleyan University five years ago. Two mouthfuls of graphic lesbian poems later, make ‘em blush she did. What she also did was make ‘em think. "People say that I’m not subtle, but then I say, That was never my goal," explains the twenty-five year old.

With roots in slam and folk, and a talent for smart, rhythmic sentences, Alix continues to disrupt the scripts of both poetry and feminism. For this Brooklyn resident, feminism is a queer, trans-supporting, gender fucking, people-loving political art. As the 1999 OutWrite national poetry slam champion and a member of the 1998 Nuyorican national championship poetry slam team, she’s been busy re-investing in, complicating, and paying her own brand of homage to the places she comes from. "There’s this cynicism in the air these days," says Alix. "But there’s also this really hot, potential political energy. I think my work, like my head, straddles those two worlds. But deep down, I do believe deeply in the power of human connection, and I’m much more interested in feeding forward movement than staid disillusionment."

In June, Feed the Fire Productions, which Alix co-founded with her partner Amy Neevel, released Alix’s debut CD, Built Like That: twenty-two tracks combining music, spoken word, political activism, and feminism. This poetry packs some deft punches: "I believe misogyny and patriarchy/are closet homolovers/and they screw over their sisters/cuz they’re scared to screw each other," from "I Believe." Missing the dynamite effect of her live performance, this intimate, challenging, and self-aware CD benefits from the collaboration of musical friends Catie Curtis, Pamela Means, Chris Pureka, and Trina Hamlin. As Alix puts it, "Some art’s real nice to look at/some art’s real neat and clean/my art forgot her tampon and she’s bleeding through her jeans/yeh my art don’t need no tampon she’ll just bleed through her jeans./My art’s just built for that/my art’s just built like that."

Freelancer Jess Arndt is working on a novel about pirates.