from Lavender
volume 6, issue 135
July 28 - August 10, 2000
One-on-one, self-described "folk poet" (like "folk singer," only...) Alix Olson is warm, funny, even ebullient; she's also a genuinely nice person. One might almost call her "low-key."
Onstage, however, facing a mike and a crowd, Olson is transformed into a one-woman show. She leads her rapt audiences through labyrinthine poems, building layer upon layer of engagingly expressed ideas until the audience is immersed in the world she's constructed. Part of it is the words themselves; Olson uses traditional poets' tools such as rhyme and alliteration to keep her audience hooked.
But an equal part of Olson's appeal in a performance setting is her delivery: careening, as the poem demands, from an irony-laced, carnival huckster's voice to a passionate tirade against the big bad wolves: the homophobes, the misogynists, the racists, and the corporate contributors to the McDonaldization of culture.
Olson's wide, apple-cheeked grin belies the force of her words-it's a cherubic smile that provides a gateway for words that "nice girls" don't say, like a snippet of the poem "Daughter":
She'll learn her cunt's good name,
the thick red lips, the small pink tips.
No more of this cryptic shit,
this vagina will be known.Olson almost looks like an impish little girl herself as she lists the ways in which her future offspring will be a "crass medusa child, a wild healthy fiend," but when she skids giddily into the big-bang finale, she's breathless and serious: Why can I create this masterpiece to mask myself? / Funny how I hide behind this daughter." Then, later, "I'll cut my own cord, head for gender war. / Yes, I'll birth myself into this / drum-beating bastard child."
Olson hits the opposite end of the spectrum with "Crone," a paean to the uncelebrated beauty and sexuality of what the "'distinguished' older men" characterize with epithets:
Crazy bags, hags, fat bitches, and old witches,
if we don't fit their granny code—
well, fuck that mold.
'Cause I've decided to trade their old lady prescription
for a witch revolution that defies description.}
Yes, this hag will ride her wrinkles to the sky,
when I'm an old witch, I'll be ready to fly.Accolades
Olson herself has a long way to go before she attains crone status, but the 24-year-old has already accumulated an impressive list of experiences and accomplishments. She's the 1999 OutWrite National Poetry Slam Champion and a member of the 1998 Nuyorican National Poetry Slam Team. She performed at the 2000 International Poetry Festival in the Netherlands, and shortly thereafter flew to London to participate in a GLBT Mardi Gras. "They needed a woman from the United States," she explains. She's given slam poetry workshops for women at Rikers Island.
For the last year and a half, Olson, a resident of New York, has been teaching for LEAP (Learning through Expended Arts Program), where she uses poetry and performance to teach middle schoolers about anything from biology to history. "[The kids] were just creative people, good people," she says earnestly, then admits, "It was hard-harder than I ever would've expected. These kids were incredibly impoverished. They'd be hungry, like literally hungry. That made it hard sometimes to get their attention." Despite the challenges, Olson is very positive about her experience.
After teaching for LEAP, Olson is ready to spend a year traveling and performing. She'll tour to support her new CD, which she calls a "half-music, half-live" effort that mixes her spoken word artistry with jazzy background tracks to make poetry more listenable-"Like something people would play in their cars," she says. Olson has a cellist, a saxophonist, a drummer, and a bass player laying tracks in the studio; her goal is to have the CD mixed in August and out by the end of September.
The bass player, she adds excitedly, is a subway musician. "He's just this neat old guy," she says. "We found him in the subway the other day, playing upright bass. Did you know that people have to audition to play in the subway?" she asks as an aside, launching a separate discussion about the process of becoming a subway musician-and demonstrating, as she often does, her commitment to providing a voice for underrepresented people.
Olson's core issues, the ones she returns to in art and in her activist life, are "[being a] lesbian, being woman-identified, anticlassism, gender play,..." she pauses to search for the right words. "Communities working together," she says finally. "People coming together to achieve things, as opposed to solitary existence."
Olson sees her task-and privilege-as an artist as "creating an ongoing dialogue with the audience." She elaborates: "The best way to be an artist is to be a sounding board-for culture, for society, for people."
It's a job she clearly relishes.