Ever-abrasive Alix Olson puts Ani DiFranco to shame

The crowd went wild as if she were a rock star. She came out in a frayed tank top, brandishing a paper doll with a needle and thread stuck into its hand. Throughout her performance, self-described "Queer Feminist" and spoken word poet Alix Olson pumped the Balch Arena Theater full of anti-chauvinism, anti-war speech, anti-globalization, and lots and lots of breath.

She mixed looped tapes of Howard Zinn's speeches in with her poetry, creating a rhythmical dynamic that she enforced by stomping and thrusting her pelvis against the microphone. She had some good things to say, but you had to listen closely for them among the ad-lib rage she drew up for most of the evening.

It would be different if the poetry were well-formed, if it made my hair stand on end, but between phrases of truth that were few and far between, what Olson called "poetry" seemed to be nothing but chaotic images of sex and violence riding on the sheer force of her voice, breath, and energy. No direction; just a string of nouns and verbs that periodically came to resemble something like a jumbled Vagina Monologue.

When she employed names of famous feminist poets like Adrienne Rich and Flannery O'Conner, it seemed more like name-dropping than a thoughtful, artistic decision. Really, if you take away the banner-message and leave the basic human passion, how is this so different from the fiercest of Dave Chapelle's routine on television?

Olson has been nationally acclaimed as one of today's top American poets. She was chosen as one of two poets to represent America at an international poetry conference. She has a vigorous touring schedule and a large following of fans, and she can stand alone on a stage for two hours and fill every inch of empty space with her voice, her laughter, and her sharp, genuine smile. Her art seems to represent a new era in performance poetry -- one in which the poet's attention is relished by her audience like that of a mainstream celebrity, and whose level of energy is comparable to that of a rock star. Like a folk singer, Olson related stories before her poems, each including an anecdote about standing up for women's rights on the street and not just on stage.

Olson is also a political activist, though she is a little sloppy in choosing where she tosses her rhetorical fervor, easily slipping into a condemnation of everything corporate, capitalist, Republican, and right wing. She did have some clever anti-imperialist jabs, however, particularly when she put on a pair of glasses with American flags in the lenses and exclaimed, "Where are the other countries! I can't see any other countries!" Her sharp yet artfully constructed commentaries definitely marked her as more sophisticated than the Ani DiFranco echelon; I daresay America hasn't heard such informed political humor since the 1960s.

Though much of her feminism was wrapped up in assertion of her sexual identity and cultivating a sense of community, she had some great anecdotes about standing up against violence. I loved one story she told in which she approached a man who was beating his girlfriend in the middle of the street; pointed at her eyes and then his and said, "I see you," and walked away. The man, confounded, stopped immediately.

Then there were the assumptions Olson made about her audience members that unfortunately alienated a few of us. When she pulled out a paper doll of President George Bush, which she called "the Shrub," she told us he wanted to know who all the "little boys" in the audience were.

"Those are girls," Olson answered sweetly. Funny. But a fellow audience member pointed out later that there could have been any number of Bush supporters in that audience. Why should she assume that all queer women are against Bush, anymore than she should assume all her fans are queer women? Isn't there an entire organization called the Gay Republicans?

But Alix Olson is only trying to empower those women who have no voice and trying to compensate for the male-dominated society we have lived in for so many years. I am not denying that this job is never finished. Alix Olson related conversations she's had in which men tell her, "Feminism has won. You can tone it down a little bit now. We're even."

And while obeying that idea may be politically threatening and a bit of a blow to the slam queeradical poet, it isn't in her best interest to alienate members of her audience who don't necessarily identify with her identity, politically or sexually.