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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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"Only 15 dollars?" the crowd calls out in response.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]And there is always a crowd, which is maybe as interesting a phenomenon as the swell of the open-mike entertainers.
Some say the appetite on U Street is just a reflection of the growing popularity of spoken word throughout the country. That showcases such as HBO's "Def Poetry Jam" gave the genre wider exposure, prompting people to seek out the talents and voices performing in their own back yard.
Some veteran members of the U Street poetry scene think President Bush deserves credit for renewed interest in their art.
"There's a kind of intersection between the Republican control of the White House and the surge of open-mike nights in Washington," says Kenny Carroll, a local poet and executive director of DC WritersCorps, a nonprofit group that places working writers in D.C. public schools to spur interest in the craft. He says the first big wave of open mikes was, in part, a reaction to the Reagan administration.
"These poets were specifically looking for places to issue a counterculture message to the Reagan-era conservative government," Carroll says. And poetic fire burning now, he adds, is fueled by an equally fervent political outrage. "When Bush got elected, there was this kind of uptick in the poetry readings. You just had this upsurge in poets, black and white, looking for venues to express their voice about the politics of the administration and specifically about the war."
Sure enough, it's a rare hour at a U Street spoken-word event when the president's policies aren't cursed with blistering fury.
As it was a century ago, proximity to Howard University is key to the vibrancy of the corridor's music and literary scene, but it's still kind of a wonder that the poets came back to the same six- or seven-block area where their forebears lived and wrote so many years ago. Some say it's actually because of those construction cranes.
"You would not have this literary scene if you did not deal first with economic revitalization," says E. Ethelbert Miller, a highly regarded Washington poet and board chair of the Institute for Policy Studies. "You have to have a space. Once you have a space, you can have a place where the writer can come."
And they have come, in great number, but there is some disagreement on whether that's a good thing for the craft.
"You have so many people doing it that sometimes things get saturated. You have so many people doing the same thing you can't tell the difference," worries Derrick Weston Brown, poet-in-residence at Busboys and Poets. The fear is that a newcomer's introduction to spoken word and poetry will be mediocre, giving them little reason to return.
But as Weston Brown knows well, there are worse problems to have than having too many poets.
