Poetry in Motion

MOTOWN YESTERDAY AND TODAY: BRIDGING THE GAP

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same

At the age of 15, Berry Gordy Jr. was inspired by poetry. Specifically, by Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” excerpted above. “I learned ‘If’ by heart,” he later recalled, “picking apart each verse and finding ways to apply its philosophies to my own life.”

***N.B. an extended deadline for WGB entries: April 20***

Gordy encountered another poet some 15 years on. Janie Bradford was introduced to him through her jazz-singing sister, and she told him that she wrote songs. When he asked to see her work, it became obvious that she wrote poems, not songs.

But within two months of that meeting, one of those poems had become the lyrics to a song, appearing as “The Joke (Is Not On Me)” on Jackie Wilson’s first solo album. Berry Gordy knew talent when he saw it. Two years later, he and Bradford wrote what became Motown’s first national hit, “Money (That’s What I Want).”

Recognising talent is an art. So is writing poetry – and, recently, the Motown Museum’s “Hitsville Next” talent programme inspired a well-credentialled British poet to launch a contest in search of, yes, poems about Motown.

This is the “motorcitysixty” competition, currently open worldwide and offering a £1,000 prize to its winner. (Full disclosure: yours truly is a guest judge.) The poetry contest also marks a significant anniversary: that of the first Motortown Revue to visit Britain, 60 years ago this month, and of the landmark TV special, The Sound of Motown, broadcast that April.

“Motorcitysixty” is the inspiration of Isabel White (no relation), who has been writing and performing poetry for more than 20 years, and who founded poetry performance collective Alarms and Excursions in 2009. Her work has been widely published, not least via BBC Radio 3’s Proms poetry competition, and in many books and journals.

“As far as I know,” Isabel told me, “there has never been published a collection of Motown-inspired poetry in the U.K. During lockdown, I joined an online celebration of Detroit spoken word, hosted as part of the ‘Hitsville Next’ education programme. It was a showcase for the dozen or so finalists in that year’s competition, and the presentation was introduced by Smokey Robinson.

A PILGRIMAGE TO WOODLAWN

“All the participants were under 25, and yet many of them referenced Motown lyrics and/or stars of yesteryear in their work. The performances were high energy, rap and hip hop in style, and did a nice job of bridging the gap between old and new Motown. That was part of the inspiration for me to develop a competition in the U.K.”

A longtime Motown fan, Isabel visited 2648 West Grand last year for the first time, and also made a pilgrimage to Detroit’s Woodlawn Cemetery, the resting place of Levi Stubbs, David Ruffin, Maxine Powell, James Jamerson and Earl Van Dyke, among others. “The staff at the cemetery said that, sadly, not enough people visit when they go to West Grand.” (Aretha Franklin, too, is buried at Woodlawn, which inspired White to write a poem about her.)

The current competition is open to work “which interprets the Motown theme in any way you wish,” continues Isabel. “Tell us about the soundtrack to your weekends, your lives, your loves, your rites of passage…” All the entries will be read by the panel of judges; the winner will be chosen from a shortlist of 50. Further details and rules for entry are available here. Should you be inspired to enter, note that the contest deadline has been extended to April 20 for entries from WGB readers. You just need to put “WGB entry” in the subject line of your email.

The award ceremony is currently planned for June 7. The event is being held under the auspices of the Clevedon Literature Festival, staged annually in Somerset in Britain’s West Country.

There has been at least one other Motown poetry contest in recent times. Texas-based Madville Publishing organised one in the U.S. in 2023, although it’s not obvious whether its plan to publish an anthology of the submissions came to pass.

Berry Gordy was not the only Motown music maker inspired by an English poet. Marvin Gaye’s second wife, Jan, remembered that when the singer was living in the U.K., he was drawn to John Keats and to his 19th century poem, “This Living Hand.” And years after Janie Bradford left Motown, she published an engaging book of her own “Lyric, Rhyme & Prose,” entitled Rolling! Take One!

For his part, Lamont Dozier gained a love for lyrics and poetry at Detroit’s Edgar Allan Poe elementary school. “I didn’t even know who Poe was when I first started going there,” the late singer/songwriter explained in his autobiography, “but when I later discovered he was a writer, I felt like I’d connected with a bit of his spirit by going to that school.”

There, Dozier’s homeroom class was given an assignment to write a poem, and “A Song” was the result. “My poem was political, and it was spiritual,” he recalled. His teacher was impressed (“She attached ‘A Song’ to the blackboard and kept it up there for six weeks”) and gave him recognition for the best poem in the class. “That feeling of praise and approval opened up something inside me.”

For Isabel White, “motorcitysixty” is a reminder of her own youth. “I first got into Motown in 1965 when, in my mid teens, I would be clubbing at least three times a week. I loved soul and ska music then, and I return to the music all the time, 60 years on.” Her all-time favourite Motown track? Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t That Peculiar,” co-written and produced by another Hitsville U.S.A. poet, Smokey Robinson.

For Berry Gordy, Kipling’s “If” schooled him in a life lesson early on. “This was the first time anyone or anything had told me that emotional strength was just as important as physical strength. You’ll be a man, my son! That stuck with me.”

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it
And – which is more – you’ll be a man, my son!

Poetry notes: his songs aside, Berry Gordy once wrote a poem to his sister, Esther Edwards. It was the result of a family meeting circa 1984, during which the Gordy siblings brought up some of the “insensitivities” he had shown them over time. He was so shocked at how strongly Esther felt about a particular incident, and how the family supported her in the meeting, that he wrote “I Wonder” to express his feelings. It can be found in To Be Loved, Gordy’s autobiography.

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