CHERRY VALLEY – “I’m for everything that’s good and against
everything that’s bad,” said the soft spoken poet shortly before his
reading Saturday. Performing at the Cherry Branch Art Gallery in Cherry
Valley before a dozen people, it was Brett Axel’s first appearance in
over a year, since taking time off to be a full time dad, with the
birth of his son, Terran, coming three months ago.
Between them, he and his partner, Rose, have five children, and when
Axel began to speak, this is all he talked about. His children. Their
accomplishments, personalities, what it’s like to be a dad.
He gushes, although that isn’t the term normally used to describe a
peace activist poet, especially one who is half Lakota, half Jewish,
who has travelled around the world performing his poetry, who has
demonstrated against war and government.
But even by his own standards, Axel isn’t normal. To be normal he
would have to conform. And even his eight year old son, Sterling,
refuses to do that, from what Axel says.
“He loves Shakespeare,” Axel says, gushing again. “He’s such a fast
learner that I’ve decided to take him out of school and home school
him. They said he’s learning too fast, that it’s not good for him and
he needs to slow down.”
His son was reprimanded recently for wearing a tee-shirt that read,
“I’d rather be home schooled.” He was told by a school official that it
was offensive. “Yet I’ve seen kids wearing shirts with ‘Budweiser’ and
‘Marlboro’ on them. That’s not offensive,” Axel said, shaking his head.
Like his poetry, Axel is straightforward. His unwavering chocolate
brown eyes are large and reflect every life experience he’s garnered,
personally, and then some.
At eight years old, left to mind his manners during a poetry reading
he attended with his mom, Axel discovered he wanted to be a poet. Since
then he has been turning his experiences into snippets of life tasty
enough for any poetic palette, even an untrained one. Although at times
the serving is hard to swallow, like the poem he read about a young
girl fighting injustice in the world.
It is a poem to her mother, and in it he spoke of how time brings
social reforms so great that people can look back and remember when
things were illegal in their day, like interracial marriage.
“Most teenagers can’t imagine a time when a handful of teenagers
could change the world,” he read, referring to the years when
segregation kept blacks and whites from swimming in the same water,
sharing the same restaurants, living space.
Humor and sarcasm are tools of his trade. He figures the best way to
get someone to understand something they don’t want to consider is with
humor. It’s easier to laugh (and learn) about something that makes you
feel uncomfortable, like bigotry and Archie Bunker.
“A smart bomb would not want to be dropped, might get together with
other smart bombs to discuss alternative employment possibilities like
demolishing old buildings,” he read to the crowd.
He pokes fun in a serious timbre, at government, social injustices,
war. Himself. In one of his recent collections of poetry that he read
from, Brett Axel Rules, he tells about a reading he was doing, during
which someone called out, mid-poem to him. “Thank you for shouting that
I rule during my poem....”
He goes on to talk about how he doesn’t rule, and how other people
don’t think he rules, and how he doesn’t even like most rulers, so that
if the person could, in the future, say that quietly to other people,
maybe then they wouldn’t shout things out during his reading.
Readings like this one in Cherry Valley are important, he says.
It gives him the opportunity to reach out to people he normally
wouldn’t be able to, and it gives him the opportunity to sell books and
meet people who may contract with him to do larger readings.
Gallery owner Bill Isaac said it’s important to host readings like
this, which he does often, to bring culture to an area that does not
get the chance very often.
Sitting in the Cherry Branch Gallery on a rainy Saturday afternoon,
Axel did what he does best. He read from his soul, and made the
audience laugh. And think.
“Poems make people think,” he said. “Poetry touches everyone. People
may not read poetry, but it creeps into people’s lives now and then,
like in a letter in a Dear Abby column.”
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