The Word Is Out

By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 24, 2007

"Attention Attention
The mic is now open
Repeat
The mic is now open
The dome headed cylindrical apparatus
That amplifies wordsoundpower
aching to reach eager ears
is now open
CALLING ALL
Poets
Page Stage Slam Street and Sidewalk.
CALLING ALL
Gutter scribes, field hollers, ring shouters, and street preachers
CALLING ALL
Big mouths, slam champions, anti-slam activists, haiku masters and motor mouths
CALLING ALL
Lovers of the word . . . "

-- Derrick Weston Brown

It's standing room only for the poets on U Street NW.

Standing room only -- for poets.

And there's nothing new here. Nothing that wasn't happening 10 years ago. And 70 years before that. And ever since the dawn of humanity.

It's just some folks talking. Telling stories. Wrapping thoughts into words. There's no computer animation or big-screen explosions or digital remixing or precious YouTube kitsch.

There's nothing new here. Nothing except this particular talking, these stories, these thoughts and these words.

And it's standing room only to listen.

* * *

On Monday nights they stream into Bar Nun. On Tuesday nights they wait two hours and are sometimes 200 deep, clamoring for a seat at Busboys and Poets. They get turned away and go to the new place next door. On Wednesday they go to Bohemian Caverns, where Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway used to play. On Thursdays they fill the booths at Mocha Hut, where the strawberry smoothies cost $3.75 but the poetry is free.

They talk sometimes about the ones who came before them. About how, before their grandparents could even imagine their parents, Langston Hughes walked these streets and Zora Neale Hurston lived here.

But just as often they talk about heartbreak, redemption, survival. They talk about how the neighborhood has changed, the region has changed, the world has changed. And how it hasn't. How it needs to and how they need to be the ones to change it.

And their followers, standing when there's no more room to sit, holler in support.

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.

"Only 15 dollars?" the crowd calls out in response.

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.

* * *

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.

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.

* * *

Christon "Christylez" Bacon has the kind of smile that could make you stop a second, forgetting the weary thing weighing on your mind.

Jerome "Face" Stevens looks like a man consumed by rage one time too many, like he felt it so often he got frozen inside it.

Bacon, 21, is adored and nurtured by the community the way a young talent should be. He wears crystals around his neck and a fedora on his head. He plays guitar and studies graphic design and teaches creative writing to young students. He comes to Mocha Hut a lot, to perform and to see his girlfriend, who manages the place. One of his verses goes like this:

"What I'm looking for? A wireless signal
So, if you have the hook-up let me grab my pencil
I looked at my friends and turned to my neighbor
My computer made a beep that sound like a pager
A name hit the screen, so ya'll know I had to check-it
Then I found out that it was password protected . . . "

Face, two decades older, is respected the way a poet with a hard-knock life and an undeniable talent should be. He carries a canvas bag of his notebooks and wears a folded bandanna around his head. His business card declares him a "gentleman of leisure," but he calls himself a warrior, and when he's asked how he makes a living, he says it's in manual labor. He comes into Mocha Hut sometimes, sits and looks restless, then leaves. One of his verses goes like this:

"Beware like your ghosts of Euro-centricity, Jesus the Christ!
For he comes and steals your woman
Comes in the night!"

Face and Bacon, miles apart in style, manner and substance, both moved from Southeast Washington to the U Street area for the poetry.

"The poetry," Face says. "And that's why I'm here now."

"This is not karaoke," explains Charlotte Fox, organizer of the D.C. Poetry Festival, an annual celebration of the U Street poetry scene, this year set for Friday at Carter Barron Amphitheatre. "It's not about you coming and singing a song and pretending. Can you write something that's profound and provocative and consciousness-raising? It's about consciousness raising."

And, she says, it's about therapy. Saying publicly the things they can't say elsewhere. Revealing secrets and fears and wounds and wishes to an audience that has come to bask in those revelations.

"That's the other part of spoken word," says Carroll, of DC WritersCorps. "It's community dialogue. It's about a validation of your own voice, the efficacy of your own words, the significance of your own voice."

Sometimes, he adds, it's just about being part of the scene -- about getting dressed up, going where everyone else is going and talking to the cute girl across the room who got dressed up and went where everyone else was going.

Maybe they will fall in love, fall apart and come back to tell the tale.

Maybe. Maybe if the spirit moves them and the words come and the mikes stay open . . .

Maybe.

"What's that expression? The jury is still out. I'm still wondering, as U Street develops, will the poetry remain?" Weston Brown asks from a window seat at Busboys. One foot in front of him is the aisle where the open-mike line starts to form, two hours early, every Tuesday night. Five feet to his rear is the shadow of a hulking new condo complex that stretches the length of a full city block. "Will poetry still be on U Street in 10 years?"

There's no telling that.

But for the moment, at least, it's still standing room only.

Ellen McCarthy is a Weekend section staff writer. Her e-mail address is mccarthye@washpost.com.