How to Leverage Poetry to Build Your Platform: Featuring Bomani Armah
Do you remember the song “Read a Book”? Did you know that Bomani Armah was the creator of that song? Did you also know that Bomani Armah has made an entire career from writing poetry and music?
One of the ways he’s done this is by bringing art and music into the classrooms of the “core” subjects. He has been able to find art within math, science, history, etc. For example, the physics of the steel drum, the history of the steel drum ⸺ which teaches colonialism, slave trade ⸺ and more.
He spent time in schools doing after-school programs after meeting with schools individually. That networking with schools and organizations created a network of organizations that will do the planning for him so he can focus on the content he’s teaching.
Bomani says, “There was a point where I was multitasking to a point where it wasn’t helpful. So once I got someone else to be like, ‘You make the curriculum. I’ll find the schools,’ the curriculum got 10 times better, twice as fast.”
He even came up with the Frederick Douglass Writing Club, which has turned into his teaching artist career. He gets 10-12 year old boys together for six hours a day at his studio. They spend time reading “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” taking field trips to places to learn about Frederick Douglass, and making rhymes about it and learning to be journalists and public speakers.
Leverage your art to build your platform
Bomani says, “I use my art to get me in front of people. When I was working full time with Busboys and Poets, there was always somebody looking for what I’m doing education-wise.”
The mindset of using your art to get in front of people is what helps Bomani to plan each next project around whether or not it will go big. If it does, awesome. If it doesn’t, at least “people just know more about who [he is].” Because then, they can opt to bring him in to write for them, to promote their stuff.
One of his biggest recommendations is to duplicate what you’re doing. While the pandemic has made it more difficult to continue his regular career in the schools, he’s been able to duplicate what he’s doing through Zoom and online to teach classes in Texas or Kenya.
“Kids still need people who can do this in person,” Bomani says. Which is why he’s brought on artists who learn how to write songs with him so they can be that big brother figure to other young people in their area. So instead of just teaching students, he’s teaching teachers so they can teach students too.
Keep in mind, all of Bomani’s material is copyrighted and gets him royalties. But he also understands that he might not get those royalties, and he’s okay with that because the important thing is that people are using his tactics and some kid is going to learn to read and write. It’s about the impact for him.
Use that art to grow your career
There’s a couple ways you can go about growing your career as a professional poet. Here’s what Bomani recommends.
Look at businesses
Huge corporations used to hire playwrights for their annual meeting. Make that you, the poet. It can be as simple as transferring the corporation’s mission, statement, message, whatever, into a spoken word piece that captivates their audience.
You can help them fulfill corporate responsibility by bringing the socially conscious conversation to their company in an effective, accurate way. Bomani mentions that a company may try to “find the extended metaphor within a project that isn’t corny. You need a poet for that.”
He also says, “Do you have on poem in your arsenal that you can do in front of your grandma? … Do you have one that you can do at your job and not get fired?”
Meaning, is there a poem you can share at a retirement community event or at your job to help those organizations share a message? Because they need someone to help them communicate, and poets can do it.
Connect with non-writers
Bomani explains it perfectly, “ Who wants to write their woman a love poem? You meet with a poet. Ya’ll talk, the poet writes it, and you give it to your lady and still be like ‘Hey, I spent money and hired a dude that helped me get my words together to make sure I express myself right.’ She’s going to love that too.”
Bypassing barriers as a teaching artist in the COVID era
Bomani says it best, “We need to all say, we need to be part of a culture shift. We all have to start taking more personal responsibility for the education of young people around us.”
With the world being virtual right now, parents are forced to be more involved in their child’s education. And Bomani can show the parents how to write raps with their kids as an English Language Arts lesson. It can be as simple as writing down a family story, taking the main points out, and write it into a song or poem. He references Will Smith’s intro to “Fresh Prince of Bel Aire” as an example of using rap to tell a story.
So Bomani has taken advantage of this time to help parents see those opportunities.
Long story short, you’ve got options, and Bomani is living proof that it’s possible.
Listen to his full episode to hear more details about how he got where he is and even more advice he has for poets, writers, and hip hop artists alike.
Bomani Armah is a Hip Hop artist, rapper, poet, songwriter, producer, performer and educator. Bomani is best known for his 2007 viral BET video “Read a Book”. He followed that up with his debut album, Radio Friendly, featuring the single “Grown A$# Man”, and became a fixture in the Hip Hop, Spoken Word and Art Integration scene in the DMV and beyond. Find more info a BabaGotBARS.com or @babagotbars on all social media.
