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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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Among the new spaces development brought is Busboys and Poets, beneath the five-story Langston Lofts, where one-bedroom condos sold for $360,000 or more.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]Iraqi-born owner Andy Shallal is a reverent man who believes in paying homage to the spirit and history of the places he traverses. Two years ago he chose the name Busboys and Poets to honor Hughes, thinking the bar and restaurant would host poetry events once in a while.
"I love poetry, so I knew there would be poetry here. But I didn't know it would be as big as it is. We went from doing poetry sporadically to doing it monthly, then weekly, then adding more," he says. "It's quite fascinating. I've been taken aback by it in a way I never expected."
There's no question the poetry on U Street would be thriving with or without Busboys. What Shallal has done, though, is create an environment that draws writers of all types, so that spoken-word performers brush elbows with classical prose lyricists and street poets sometimes sit next to luminaries.
"It brings people together who wouldn't necessarily be together in other venues in D.C.," Weston Brown says. "In D.C., you could go to other open mikes and the ratio could be 60-40 black to white. You come to Busboys and you see everybody. It's cool."
It has become, for example, Sarah Browning's favorite haunt. The strawberry-haired poet and activist moved to the District from western Massachusetts five years ago, looking for a community of like-minded writers with whom she could commune and work and strategize. Once it opened, Busboys provided the backdrop for that circle and will play primary host -- along with other spots in the neighborhood -- to a national antiwar poetry festival she is organizing to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion in March.
"For us, it's been quite an extraordinary addition. . . . It's changed my life completely, just in terms of having a place to host events regularly," Browning says of the restaurant. "It's become a real home both for the progressive community and the poetry community and the overlap."
Busboys sits in the belly of gentrification, is part of it even, but Shallal is nothing if not conscious of the neighborhood's roots. From the beginning of the Tuesday night open mikes, an old man used to come like clockwork every week. Sometimes he'd even get up to read a poem.
Shallal pulled him aside one day for a cup of coffee and a chat. He was in his 80s and had lived around U Street for a long, long time. Long enough to remember when there was an African American community center just about where Busboys is now. Long enough to remember the poets who used to come and read there, like clockwork every week. Every Tuesday night.
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Christon "Christylez" Bacon has the kind of smile that could make you stop a second, forgetting the weary thing weighing on your mind.
