About Us

Where Words Come Alive.

Who Are We?

Simply Poetry Ltd is a performance poetry production company. We produce poetry for mainstream audiences. We do live shows, stage productions, videos, audios, spoken word presentations, and other types of events derived from the creative manipulation of Poetry. The company was started in 2016 by foremost Nigerian Performance Poet, Dike Chukwumerije.

What Drives Us

Our Mission

To deliver performance poetry to new and constantly growing audiences, in a manner that is widely accessible, supportive of the career goals of our artists, and able to inspire conscious trends in popular culture.

Our Vision

To be a global model for the successful mainstreaming of a conscious art form.

Our Core Values

Simplicity

We believe in creating Simple Art. This is art that prioritises substance over spectacle, meaning over method, and message over form.

So, we believe in minimalism, in using everyday language, commonplace materials, and the normal experiences of everyday people to create impactful art. We encourage our artists to create art that stands out, not for its technical sophistry, but for its evocative and communicative depth, and its depiction of salient truths about life and human nature.

Authenticity

We believe in creating Honest Art. This is art that is a sincere reflection of the thoughts and feelings of the artist.

So, we invest time in developing a deep understanding of ourselves in relation to the world around us. And we encourage our artists to be brave enough to project their unique perspectives into the world of ideas, whether those perspectives fit into mainstream paradigms or not. We believe in creating instinctively, from the heart; in following intuition; and in learning craft, not as hallowed rules, but as tools to be used in service of the artist’s unique creative instinct.

Consciousness

We believe in creating Conscious Art. This is art that is relevant to the socio-cultural, socio-economic and socio-political issues that trouble the world we live in.

While we know that art can be used as a means of escape, for its own sake, and to deep-dive into the abstract subconscious of the artist, we choose to use our art to interrogate the world in which the people we would like to see consume that art live. So, we use our art intentionally to shape narratives, shift paradigms, and challenge people to see the world they live in in new ways. For we believe that the world without is a reflection of the world within, and so positive social change is unsustainable without significant shifts in perspective.

Hear from the founder of it all...

CEO’s Message

Hello, my name is Dike Chukwumerije, and I am the CEO and Creative Director of Simply Poetry Ltd. I am a Nigerian performance poetry artist with over a decade of experience in the industry. My wife, Anesi Imoedemhe, and I founded the company in 2016 because we believed that:

1. The re-shaping of popular culture is key to national development, and that entertainment is a grossly under-utilised tool for doing this.
2. Life should be lived from within, that is, from inside out. So, people should seek success by following passion, discovering purpose, developing and utilising natural talents, rather than by simply analysing existing economic patterns and conditioning oneself to fit mechanically into these.
3. The sharing of stories is critical to the shaping and re-shaping of group identities, because a community is a shared story. So, a critical part of nation building, and mediating conflicts between disparate identities in society, is the production of empathy, which is one of the key outcomes of sharing stories.
Simply Poetry Ltd is therefore a creative business with a strong social consciousness. We want to achieve commercial success, while supporting the emergence of a more open, tolerant and meritocratic society. We are particularly passionate about supporting young artists, through workshops, training, and the provision of opportunities, funding, and safe performance spaces.
I hope we will be able to work together with you in some way to achieve these goals!