Arts & Entertainment
Jorge Martín: Composing Himself
Alix Olson: Combining All the isms
Arts & Entertainement
Alix Olson: Combining All the isms
by Cathy Resmer
On a recent afternoon in her Brooklyn apartment Alix Olson was stuggling with directions for constructing a new piece of furniture. Her roommates were at work, but she didn’t mind tackling the project on her own. Thanks to a recent grant from the New York State Council for the Arts, she says, "I’m the stay-at-home artist. This is what I get to do."
Olson is a performance poet. She moved to New York after graduating from Wesleyan College in 1997 with a BA in English. One night in 1998, she signed up to perform at a poetry slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. She was later selected for the Nuyorican’s poetry slam team, which that year won the National Poetry Slam Championship. She also won the 1999 Outwrite National Queer Poetry Slam last February.
Olson’s slam set list is taken mostly from her chapbook, Only The Starving Favor Peace–a rallying cry for those beleaguered by the rainbow flag corporate assimilationist brouhaha. Ironically, Girlfriends Maga-zine, which recently endorsed bio-engineering multinational Monsanto and Chevron Oil as two of the top ten places for lesbians to work, named Olson "girlfriend of the month" earlier this year. Olson deftly tackles such taboo subjects as the American corporate monoculture, female masturbation, and the sexualization and demonization of post-menopausal lesbians. She doesn’t beat around the bush, so to speak – she dives right in.
In "Witches," a poem that pays homage to lesbians "in their crone prime," she writes, "I’ll give myself a lube job, shake my broomstick until my clit throbs...sweep that granny off her feet." A lot of older lesbians have reacted positively to Olson’s work, but sometimes people tell her to "tone it down." "A lot of women still have a very timid way of talking about their bodies," she says. This is one of the reasons her work is so sex-positive. "You have to go over the top with language," she says. "If it were ok to say those things, people wouldn’t react so strongly to it."
Olson’s experience teaching in New York City’s public schools has shown her the need for this kind of openness. She works with the Night Star program, teaching sex ed and sexual awareness classes to high school students. She describes a game called Cross the Line where students indicate agreement with a statement by stepping over an imaginary line. "We would say, ‘it’s ok for boys to masturbate,’ and they’d all cross the line. We’d say, ‘it’s ok to be gay,’ and they’d all cross the line. Then we’d say, ‘it’s ok for girls to masturbate,’ and out of a class of 30, two of them would cross the line. These girls were outgoing and raucous about everything else, and none of them knew the correct terms for the parts of their vaginas! They’re thought of as this new generation of women who are sexually aware, but for them, saying ‘clit’ was not very easy."
Poetry slamming was a natural outlet for Olson’s synthesis of poetry and activism. "I’d say at least half of the performance poets I know are activists," she says. "In the slam scene, there’s a lot of emphasis on activism, on changing stuff."
Olson teaches poetry slam workshops though the Gowanus Arts Exchange. Recently she, and other Nuyorican poets, have been teaching performance poetry to members of a nurses and custodial union, helping to lead them in after work poetry slams. This kind of grassroots outreach is what differentiates slam from traditional poetry readings–the kind held in bookstores or coffeeshops, or galleries. Slam is an urban phenomenon that rewards a poet’s engaging and energetic delivery, and demands audience participation. "There’s such a cacophony of voices," says Olson. "Even though there’s a kind of formula [for slamming at the national level], there’s definitely still this idea of ‘anyone can do it.’ It’s very democratic."
Olson is involved in a variety of other projects, including Rainbow Flags For Mumia. Olson’s work, along with that of other Nuyorican poets, is featured on a compilation cd recently released to benefit Mumia Jamal’s defense. The African-American journalist was convicted (under dubious circumstances) of killing a Philadelphia police officer.
Olson says her LGBT and anti-racist work intersected during a recent visit by Fred Phelps. Mumia supporters and the anti-Phelps crowd joined forces unable to get separate demonstration permits. This, she says, confused Phelps and his small band of miscreants, who began screaming "cop killers! cop killers!" Olson continues, "Basically, they just knew that the people on the other stood for something they didn’t like, but they weren’t really sure what. It was really great, combining all these isms, having all these people standing up for each other." Unfortunately, she says, "a few of the rich white Christopher Street people starting yelling, ‘white trash go home,’ and I thought ‘whoops, there’s the other ism, and this time we’re on the wrong side.’"
Alix Olson is proving that success and popularity doesn’t have to mean giving up good old fashioned radical lesbian feminist politics. She continues to talk the talk, walk the walk, and assemble her own furniture.