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The Word Is Out
Kalba Ororume steps up to the mike at Bar Nun, one of U Street NW's numerous venues showcasing the area's poets.
(Mark Finkenstaedt for The Washington Post)
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And their followers, standing when there's no more room to sit, holler in support.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]It's ancient and profound and alive on U Street -- amid a blooming thicket of luxury condos and rocketing rents -- as it is nowhere else in the city.
Poetic justice, perhaps.
* * *
Hughes and Hurston were here for a while, and so were dozens of others, including Angelina Grimke and Alain Locke, who would gather at poet Georgia Douglas Johnson's house on S Street NW for Saturday night literary soirees in the 1920s and 1930s while Black Broadway popped and sparkled a few streets up.
Howard University was the nexus and the draw for many of the writers. Hughes had hoped to go there but couldn't quite raise the money for tuition. He was living in the U Street corridor and working at what is now the Marriott Wardman Park hotel when he slipped some finished pieces to a famous Russian poet staying at the hotel who soon declared in a newspaper that he had discovered a "Negro busboy poet."
Riots and looting in the late 1960s scarred the neighborhood indelibly, but the poets returned in force two decades later. Places like Mango's and Kaffa House opened their doors and the microphones, and shortly thereafter, there was a scene. An electric, discerning one that grew into a throbbing mix of spoken word, hip-hop and funky, original songwriting.
Swank development came fast and furious with the turn of the millennium, sweeping away half-filled parking lots and boarded-up shop fronts, repopulating the streets with expensive shoe stores, sleek home decor retailers and new residents, who came from the suburbs or somewhere else. It threatened to change the character of the neighborhood and the flavor of its artistry. And it did. But change isn't the same as vanquish. If anything, say those who've been around a while, the poetry on U Street has grown more abundant in recent years, even as construction cranes took over the skyline.
"It's the right place at the right time and the right energy," says Brent "Munch" Joseph, one of the founders of the Monday night Bar Nun event, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last month. "Just with people being consistent with the shows, more and more people started to go see it and know about it.
"And I truly believe the spirit of that [U Street] arts scene has planted itself in that area, and it almost invites you to participate or create something that extends that legacy."
So the poets swing from venue to venue, passing out cards and fliers, announcing the addresses of their MySpace pages and pushing $5, $10, $15 CDs of their work.
"Only 15 dollars!" the Thursday night poets at Mocha Hut say.
