Three poets discuss politics, racism and gender

Sarah Siegel Life Editor

The First Year Experience program’s latest installment, “3 Poets, 1 Mic,” captivated students gathered into the Student Center on Jan. 22. The event featured three poets presenting interrogations of race, gender and class.

Organizer and Director of Residential Life Luis Inoa introduced the event as a moment for reflection and a call to action.

The program began with nationally acclaimed spoken-word artist Alix Olson, who performed at Vassar in 2003 and 2005. She began the program with poems that displayed what she called “graceful rage.” Her poetry discussed sexism through satire that cut at an overblown American culture.
In one piece that called out to the “Walmart congregation,” Olson declared that America was on sale and “all ethics must go.” In another poem, composed of mock-diary entries, she compared the United States to a controlling and childish boyfriend.

Olson did, however, make the occasional jab at her own politics. She recalled that as a toddler at her first protest, she asked her mother why the crowd was so angry.

The evening continued with prison activist and New York University Professor of Poetry Bryonn Bain. In contrast to Olson’s explosive consonants and sometimes-stale orchestration, Bain’s poems recalled 1920s Harlem renaissance styles of jive with rolling, interlocking and overlapping rhyme schemes and the occasional song. Bain deconstructed notions of race and criminality and confronted sexism.
“We used to lock lips like a lunar eclipse,” Bain crooned to a woman at the beginning of one poem, over the course of which he comes to understand why the woman doesn’t appreciate the simile. At the end she concedes, “We used to lock lips like a lunar eclipse/but I am not the moon/and ain’t no man gonna walk all over me.”

The last artist, Staceyann Chin, took the stage with full force, stating, “Thank God they covered all of that stuff; because it means that now I get to talk about pussy.”

Irreverent and exultant Chin helped pioneer the spoken-word movement of the early 1990s. She dominated the room with spoken pieces concerning topics ranging from the simplicity and impossibility of personal belief (“I believe in monsters under the bed because they give poor children something to conquer before the world starts to conquer them.”) to the first time she used a menstrual pad (sticky-side up).

A haiku on Bush’s second term simply states, “How can you fuck up so many times and still be voted president?” She described the haiku’s form as “short—like having sex with a young boy.”

In keeping with Inoa’s goals of educated reflection, by the end of the night, it seemed that both the presenters and audience agreed with Bain: “It takes more than common sense to make sense of what’s common.”