Making A Case For Her: She Is Stardust, She Is Golden, But We’ve Got To Get Back To Considering Joni Mitchell as a Poet
Wednesday is about books, and writing. Today, I share an academic essay I wrote recently considering Joni Mitchell as a poet, in comparison with Bob Dylan.
Previously I mentioned studying a paper towards an Honours degree in English. The paper is around modern poetry, both the writing of our own original work and the analysis of 20th and 21st Century poetic forms. I shared with you my first essay about the poetry of Gil Scott Heron and the poetics that informed his work. (But only after the essay had been handed in, graded, and given its pass mark - yay!). And now the course is over, and I passed the whole course by the way (another yay!). So I wanted to share the second essay - this one was about making a case for Joni Mitchell as a poet, comparing her to Bob Dylan, not comparing the work, rather looking at how Dylan has been easily embraced as a ‘poet’, whereas the connection to poetry is more obvious in Joni’s work, yet she’s denied the label. Where Dylan embraced tradition, so it could work for him, Mitchell has often been cast as someone ‘difficult’ for being determined to cut her own path. Anyway, it was fun to write - and I feel like it’s a topic so big I could have a go at it for a Masters Thesis or Ph.D topic. Hmmm…dangerous…anyway, I hope you enjoy or value this in some way. Curious to know what you think…
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Joni Mitchell had a poem published in The New Yorker. It was September, 2007.[i] It was the lyric to a brand new song from a brand new album[ii], but there it was – presented as a poem, after all the song wasn’t there yet, ahead of the release of the recording it was only the words. A year earlier, Mitchell’s lyric for her 1970s, generation/era-defining anthem, Woodstock[iii], had been included in an anthology of “Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems”[iv] and when the anthology’s curator/editor, Camille Paglia called Joni Mitchell to tell her “you know, you could have been a poet”, Mitchell laughed and suggested she was since she was in the anthology. She then asked what had stopped her from being deemed a poet. “A book”, came Paglia’s reply. Mitchell then pointed to the fact that her 1998 collection of lyrics was called “Complete Lyrics and Poetry”[v] against the publisher’s wishes (they believed poetry didn’t sell, and wanted it billed as rock lyrics). [vi]
Bob Dylan had released an experimental novel – but no poetry outside of the lyrics to his well-known tunes (unless you want to count his unpublished sixteen-page folio, Poems Without Titles from 1959 which went for, ahem, more than a song in the 2005 Christies auction[vii]) – when, in 2016, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was not without negative commentary. Some academics hang on, still, to Glyn Maxwell’s claims that poetry “carries its own music” and therefore isn’t song, so, (presumably) songs cannot be poetry[viii]. There was an outcry around a songwriter, even if it was Bob Dylan, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. When the rapper Kendrick Lamar won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize (for his 2017 album, DAMN[ix]) he was awarded it in the category of Music, not Literature. There might never have been a more lyrics-focussed, dare I say literate/literature-leaning category of music than hip-hop, and yet the Dylan win – which was processed not as his victory, but rather as the loss for so many poets, actual poets – has scared songwriters back to their place. Kendrick Lamar, a lyricist who performs onstage with no live musical accompaniment, his words delivered a cappella or to pre-recorded beats, essentially won a composer’s award, which meant the classical world was miffed, in much the way that some poets were when the man that wrote “the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face”[x] and chose to put it in a song rather than on paper took home the Nobel. That Dylan win was not nothing though. His speech was even released as a standalone volume, making him a published novelist, illustrator, songwriter, and speechwriter.
But Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature stands legitimately as his victory-lap, even with some nitpicking. Because Bob Dylan has long been considered a poet (“and a prophet”[xi]). Leonard Cohen was first and foremost a poet. So, too, was Patti Smith. Both published and performed their poetry, and won awards, before they ever connected their voice to a microphone with the purpose of expressing lyrics over a melody. Bob Dylan was first and foremost a songwriter, but by aligning himself with the folk movement, by championing the work of Woody Guthrie, by naming himself after a poet (Dylan Thomas)[xii], and by seeking friendships and collaboration with Allen Ginsberg and Sam Shepherd, and name-dropping the likes of Jack Kerouac, Langston Hughes, Shakespeare, and Homer, he manufactured an audience consent. They took him on his word, as it were. Yes, he would be able to prove it, but he had been given the chance ahead of time. Many believe his embracing of folk music was tactical, he took the genre for a joy-ride so that he could keep its fanatical audience-base.
Joni Mitchell has fought to be heard as a poet. She has fought every step of the way through her career: Arguing with record companies over arrangements, against making cheesy videos, and releasing radio-ready singles, fighting to have serious jazz musicians on her albums, to record a tribute/collaboration with Charles Mingus. She has been remembered for her fighting. And not often in a good way.
Joni Mitchell rejected folk music. She was born Roberta Joan Anderson[xiii]. Taking the name of her husband, Chuck, she was, briefly, part of a musical duo that worked the folk clubs. When she and Chuck divorced, she kept her married name. Chuck was relegated to obscurity, very quickly fading from view. The name ‘Joni Mitchell’ is then, in some way, as much of a construct as ‘Bob Dylan’ (he was born Robert Allen Zimmerman[xiv]). It is the name she made to make music under.
Mitchell’s early albums were still considered ‘folk’ in some sense, given the acoustic instrumentation, but as soon as she began writing her original songs she was removing herself from the folk tradition. More in line with modern poetry’s framing of nostalgia as a poetic device, anchoring place and memory through simile and metaphor, Joni Mitchell’s best songs brim with ideas, are both deeply personal and widely relatable, and challenge the strict forms of obvious rhyme and metre, stretching out way beyond the confines of a pop-song format.
Even in her more conventional ‘lyrics’, Joni Mitchell was at play, like a poet. In Both Sides Now[xv], she takes one of songwriting’s absolute cliches – the golden no-no of rhyming ‘moon’ with ‘June’ (long considered a lazy trope) – and flaunts it as an internal rhyme, all the while building a resonant metaphor within a metaphor. Her lines build the metaphor of looking at clouds as a way of looking at love, eventually the metaphor of clouds is in fact the metaphor for how one looks at life.
First the description of the clouds is built through poetic imagery, a series of metaphoric comparisons:
Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way[xvi]
The second verse sets up the second way to look at clouds, from the fluffy and calming to the carriers of a storm:
But now they only block the sun
They rain and they snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in the way[xvii]
Now the chorus – or refrain – is set up, we can return to the line “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now” because both sides have been documented. And then the realisation that her memory is only bringing back “illusions” and she really doesn’t know clouds at all.[xviii]
That’s a framework to explore ‘Love’ (“I’ve looked at love from both sides now”) and eventually ‘Life’ (“I’ve looked at life from both sides now”).[xix] Each time it is the illusion that is being recalled. And within this framework, Mitchell subverts the cliché of obvious rhymes by beginning a line, “Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels” which both follows on from the opening example (“Rows and flows”) and sets up further internal rhymes in that style (“Tears and fears”, “Dreams and schemes”). These childlike rhymes are used only in the ‘Positive’ verses, when she looks at clouds/love/life from the other ‘side’ it’s more frank, with a blunt end-rhyme (“But now they only block the sun/They rain and they snow on everyone”, “… just another show/And you leave ‘em laughing when you go”, “they shake their heads and tell me I’ve changed/Well something’s lost, but something’s gained”). This is an economical way of showing the dizzy-headed delights of being swept up in something, and then the more matter of fact way of considering the (more negative) alternative; the downside.
We get a final line repetition, “I really don’t know life at all” (x2) which feels like the conclusion of a Shakespearean sonnet as much as a pop song. The metaphor of clouds has opened up into a metaphor for life. [xx]
This is still in the earliest days of Mitchell’s recording career, the songs from her first two albums being pulled together from material she wrote as a teenager in some cases. And Both Sides Now was a hit song for Judy Collins before Mitchell even recorded her own version. So further proof of her ambitions as a writer, and her standing as ‘poet’ could be drawn here. A recognised artist (Collins) chose to record the song based only on reading the lyrics. By comparison, Bob Dylan sang his own material before anyone ever covered it, and more than that his first album is comprised, mostly, of folk standards, blues songs and cover versions, with Dylan originals accounting for just two of the 13 songs. His ‘Talkin’ New York’ is a thin approximation of the early 1960s folk tradition of talking-blues songs with casual asides delivered as if a barbed bit of wit. In Dylan’s first recorded example he speak-sings, “A lot of people don't have much food on their table/But they got a lot of forks n' knives/And they gotta cut somethin’” [xxi]
It might be an example of what Lou Reed famously called “marijuana throwaways” – in his dismissive (albeit competitive) commentary on Dylan’s elevation as a poet in the popular culture of the mid/late 1960s. Reed even said, “He [Dylan] did have a nice flair for words that didn’t mean anything”.[xxii] Dylan’s other original song on his first album, ‘Song to Woody’ is a tribute to his chief songwriting inspiration and follows the folk-ballad style of Guthrie’s compositions. So much so that it’s possible that Dylan’s chief compositional tools for creating the song included a crayon and some grease proof paper.
Joni Mitchell’s canonical works include protest songs that are aligned with the hippie movement and feel like poetry for their sentiment (‘Big Yellow Taxi’[xxiii]) and era-defining anthems (‘Woodstock’[xxiv]) that sum up a collective experience by channeling the mysticism of the moment with a bonus biblical reference (“We are stardust, we are golden, but we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden”[xxv]) but her greatest achievements as a poetic lyricist came when she turned inward. Her personal statements on the album Blue[xxvi] include songs for many famous ex-lovers (James Taylor is immortalised in the title song, a reference to his depression, Graham Nash is the inspiration for the song ‘My Old Man’). In the sexist world of the 1970s music industry it was a popular talking point trying to decide which song on Blue was about which famous male musician (David Crosby, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and Leonard Cohen are all names that were floated for various songs). But Blue cuts deepest when Mitchell is examining herself in these moments. The song ‘Little Green’ is about the heartbreaking decision to give up her child for adoption since she was pregnant out of wedlock (“Child with a child pretending…”[xxvii]). Or the song, ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’, which isn’t about the ex-lover so much as it is about Joni’s scathing takedown, her decision to out her own feelings almost reads, now, like the equivalent of a social media comment from 50 years ago; an updated status that hides its bitterness in cheeky projection. In the lyrics of a song, Mitchell reduces the fictional ‘Richard’, a composite of characters, in the lines:
“Richard got married to a figure skater/ And he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator /And he drinks at home now most nights with the TV on /And all the house lights left up bright”[xxviii]
Inspired by a conversation with the folk singer, Patrick Sky, ‘Richard’ sees Joni go full “hopeless cynic”, the challenge Sky had laid down after calling her a hopeless romantic.[xxix] The song says more about Mitchell than it does ‘Richard’. The song feels much more closely connected to a Fleur Adcock poem than to any of Mitchell’s songwriting contemporaries. But this not Advice To A Discarded Lover[xxx], merely cynical judgment of one.
Mitchell likes to marry her words to geographical locations, naming places and conjuring visual imagery of scenes. She attributes this to her skill with painting, and says that an early teacher first told her that if you can paint you can write, since “writing is just painting with words”.[xxxi] Mitchell believes she writes evocative scenes and sensory motifs into her songs because she is conveying the feeling of what she might paint – and this feels like a fine description of how a poet might anticipate creating something lasting, or certainly how they might want to feel on completion. A fine example of this in Joni Mitchell’s work is the song ‘River’.[xxxii] The song is in fact a harrowing cry at the breakdown of a relationship. In wishing she had a river to skate away on she links the time of year (Christmas) and the season (winter in the Northern Hemisphere) to the chill she is feeling, and the regression to a childlike activity to ease her mind. Her wish for an iced-over river to skate on is what takes her mind away from losing the best baby she ever had[xxxiii] - in this case ‘baby’ refers to a romantic partner not an actual child. The deeply personal story, and the sadness of the heartbreak has been somewhat misinterpreted over the years with hundreds of cover versions because the poetic framing of it as a ‘Christmas story’ takes priority in a lot of minds. A clever deception.
But it’s the song ‘A Case of You’[xxxiv] that shows Mitchell’s deeply personal stories being framed via poetic device to become universal, relatable.
Just before our love got lost you said
“I am as constant as a northern star”
And I said, “Constantly in the darkness
Where’s that at?
If you want me I’ll be in the bar”[xxxv]
Apart from the rhyme, there’s little to suggest this as a song lyric. It’s an uncomfortable rhyme too, the line “If you want me I’ll be in the bar” is another of Mitchell’s clever deceptions. She is setting up a story that has her as the unreliable narrator – but not an un-relatable one. She’s dismissive of her lover who believes he’s as constant as the norther star. She mocks him but actually the opening line has already done that by telling the audience that the love is lost, gone. Eventually we will find a metaphor buried deep in the song, because the line about being at the bar unfolds as a towering tribute to the intoxication of a love interest, making it feel almost literal by saying “I could drink a case of you, darling/And I would still be on my feet”. Before that can happen she has provided a location in the song (“I drew a map of Canada”) and tells us she has sketched the person’s face on it (“twice”).[xxxvi] All of this detail sets up the song’s deepest lines: The juxtaposition of bitter and sweet feelings in the line “you’re in my blood like holy wine/You taste so bitter and so sweet”, which again helps to set up the title line as pay-off. And there’s also more dialogue within the song’s narrative – a rarity within songs, to have quoted lines, to have memories of dialogue from the past: “I remember that time you told me/You said, “Love is touching souls”/Surely you touched mine/‘Cause part of you pours out of me/In these lines from time to time”. It is starting to feel bardic now – which links to the Bacchanalian spirit of this memoralisation. The boast of drinking a case of you has also been interpreted (misinterpreted?) as proof of the strength of the love, but isn’t it an announcement in defiance: You are no match for me. I can take everything you have and won’t be defeated? Another great Joni Mitchell metaphor sits inside this song, as almost a throwaway: “Oh, I am a lonely painter/I live in a box of paints”. I like to think of this as a sly admission that the writing-version of Joni, and the written portrait of her is tougher than the ‘real’ her, who perhaps we never quite meet in her songs. Roberta Joan Anderson might not have been quite so strong.
In her review of the 1996 Hits and Misses compilations, Susan Whitall writes for the Houston Press, that Mitchell’s visceral images speak to anyone who has ever longed for a lover; they can “understand [these lines] in their bones”.[xxxvii] She was speaking about A Case of You more specifically when she points to the power of that comeback in the opening lines, “I’ll be in the bar” to clap back at the lover that says they’re as constant as the northern star.[xxxviii] Whitall also believes that the music industry’s sexism has a part to play in Mitchell’s self-deprecation being mistaken for bitterness.[xxxix] Neil Young is revered despite making many more wrong turns in his career.[xl]
Blue was the start of Joni Mitchell stretching out. Both lyrically, and musically. But here she uses the folk instrumentation (dulcimer, guitar, piano) to frame her lyrics. She doesn’t use it in a form of folk tradition however. And she would abandon the simple instrumentation as the lyrics sprawled beyond couplets and measurable lines.
In the albums to come, particularly the late-1970s trilogy of Hissing Of Summer Lawns[xli], Hejira[xlii] and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter[xliii], Mitchell would stretch out her lyrics across several lines, taking risks and reaching wide. The music is sometimes barely able to contain the lines, but as she was developing whole new chord shapings and progressions, and extending out to use genre-defying, era-defining musicians (Jaco Pastorious, Pat Metheny, Peter Erskine, Don Alias) it’s wise to think that the music and the lyrics were still so deeply in service to one another, each pushing the other out into wider territories. Mitchell might have needed these great musicians to help her realise this goal, but they needed her to make their CVs look impressive. She was a musical innovator and all the while she was pushing the way a lyric might sit on a page, even if when she sang it on the stage it seemed to resemble the common angle of what a song-lyric might do and say.
Bob Dylan wrote more than “marijuana throwaways” of course. But every time he got stuck, he released a covers album to try to reinvent himself, to find a way back. Joni Mitchell just kept making deeper work. She mentions Rousseau’s paintings on one album[xliv]and Dorothy Lamour’s sarongs on another[xlv]. She word-plays for fun on ‘Sex Kills’ (“Is justice Just Ice?”)[xlvi] . She never slowed down to including more than one cover on an album, and has never recorded herself singing anything by Bob Dylan. But the 2016 Nobel Prize winner for Literature has released his own version of Big Yellow Taxi.[xlvii] And it is horrible.
We need to make a case for her – as poet. Her influence on two generations now of writers, musicians, artists might even be reason enough. She is golden.
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Sources
books/periodicals:
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, Claire Dederer, Knopf; 2023.
Bob Dylan: Lyrics 1962-1985 – Includes All of Writings and Drawings, Bob Dylan, Alfred A. Knopf; 1985.
Bob Dylan: 100 Songs, Bob Dylan, Simon & Schuster; 2017.
Bob Dylan: The Nobel Lecture, Bob Dylan, Simon & Schuster; 2017.
The Double Life of Bob Dylan Vol. 1- 1941-1966, A Restless Hungry Feeling, Clinton Heylin, Vintage; 2021.
Reckless Daughter: A Joni Mitchell Anthology, Barney Hoskyns (ed), Rock’sBackPages/Constable; 2016.
The Joni Mitchell Companion: Four Decades of Commentary, Stacey Luftig (ed), Schirmer Books; 2000.
Joni Mitchell In Her Own Words: Conversations with Malka Marom, Malka Marom w/ Joni Mitchell, ECW Press; 2014.
On Poetry, Glyn Maxwell, Oberon Books; 2012.
Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period, Michelle Mercer, Simon & Schuster; 2009.
Joni Mitchell: The Complete Poems and Lyrics, Joni Mitchell, Three Rivers Press; 1998.
The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell, Katherine Monk, Greystone Books; 2012.
Court and Spark: 33 1/3, Sean Nelson, Continuum Publishing Group; 2007.
Joni Mitchell: Shadows and Light – The Definitive Biography, Karen O’Brien, Virgin Books; 2001.
Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems, Camille Paglia (ed), Knopf; 2006.
Joni on Joni: Interviews and Encounters with Joni Mitchell, Susan Whitall (ed), Chicago Review Press/An A Capella Book; 2019.
Lou Reed: Between The Lines, Michael Wrenn, Plexus Publishing; 1993
Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, David Yaffe, Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
UNCUT: The Ultimate Music Guide – Joni Mitchell, John Robinson (ed), BandLabUK Limited; 2020/2021.
The New Yorker, September 17; 2007.
albums:
Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan, Columbia, 1962
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Columbia, 1963
Blonde on Blonde, Columbia, 1966
Bob Dylan, Dylan, Columbia, 1973
Under The Red Sky, Columbia, 1990
Good As I Been To You, Columbia, 1993
World Gone Wrong, Columbia, 1994
Kendrick Lamar: Damn, Interscope/Aftermath/Top Dawg Entertainment, 2017
Joni Mitchell: Song to a Seagull, Reprise, 1968
Clouds, Reprise, 1969
Ladies of the Canyon, Reprise, 1970
Blue, Reprise, 1971
For the Roses, Asylum, 1972
Court and Spark, Asylum, 1974
The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Asylum, 1975
Hejira, Asylum, 1976
Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, Asylum, 1977
Mingus, Asylum, 1979
Turbulent Indigo, Reprise, 1994
Shine, Hear Music/Universal, 2007
The Red Hot Chili Peppers: Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Warner Bros. Records, 1991
podcasts:
All Songs Considered, NPR, Brandi Carlile on the Radical Vulnerability of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’, Ann Powers, 29/06/2021
[i] The New Yorker, September 17, 2007
[ii] Joni Mitchell, ‘Bad Dreams’, Shine, 2007
[iii] Joni Mitchell, ‘Woodstock’, Ladies of the Canyon, 1970
[iv] Camille Paglia (ed), Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems, 2006
[v] Joni Mitchell, The Complete Poems and Lyrics, 1998
[vi] Malka Marom w/ Joni Mitchell, Joni Mitchell In Her Own Words: Conversations with Malka Marom, 2014, pp 213-214
[vii] Clinton Heylin, The Double Life of Bob Dylan Vol. 1 – 1941-1966, A Restless Hungry Feeling, 2021, p.59
[viii] Glyn Maxwell, On Poetry, 2012
[ix] Kendrick Lamar, DAMN, 2017
[x] Bob Dylan, ‘Visions of Joanna’, Blonde on Blonde, 1966
[xi] Anthony Kiedis, ‘Give It Away Now’, Blood Sugar Sex Magik (The Red Hot Chili Peppers), 1991
[xii] Heylin, 2021, pp.36, 57, 58, 387, 424, 429
[xiii] Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joni_Mitchell
[xiv] Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan
[xv] Joni Mitchell, ‘Both Sides Now’, Clouds, 1969
[xvi] The Complete Poems and Lyrics, 1998
[xvii] Ibid.
[xviii] Ibid.
[xix] Ibid.
[xx] Ibid.
[xxi] Bob Dylan, ‘Talkin’ New York’, Bob Dylan, 1962 / Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan: Lyrics 1962-1985, 1985
[xxii] Michael Wrenn, Lou Reed: Between The Lines, 1993, p.23
[xxiii] Joni Mitchell, ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, Ladies of the Canyon, 1970
[xxiv] Joni Mitchell, ‘Woodstock’, Ladies of the Canyon, 1970
[xxv] Ibid / The Complete Poems and Lyrics, 1998
[xxvi] Joni Mitchell, Blue, 1971
[xxvii] The Complete Poems and Lyrics, 1998
[xxviii] Joni Mitchell, ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’, Blue, 1971 / The Complete Poems and Lyrics, 1998
[xxix] Michelle Mercer, Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period, 2009
[xxx] ‘Advice to a Discarded Lover’ (Poem), Fleur Adcock
[xxxi] Malka Marom w/ Joni Mitchell, Joni Mitchell In Her Own Words: Conversations with Malka Marom, 2014
[xxxii] Joni Mitchell, ‘River’, Blue, 1971
[xxxiii] Ibid / The Complete Poems and Lyrics, 1998
[xxxiv] Joni Mitchell, ‘A Case of You’, Blue, 1971
[xxxv] Ibid /The Complete Poems and Lyrics, 1998
[xxxvi] Ibid
[xxxvii] Barney Hoskyns (ed), Reckless Daughter: A Joni Mitchell Anthology, 2016
[xxxviii] Ibid.
[xxxix] Ibid.
[xl] Ibid.
[xli] Joni Mitchell, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, 1976
[xlii] Joni Mitchell, Hejira, 1976
[xliii] Joni Mitchell, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, 1977
[xliv] Joni Mitchell, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, 1976
[xlv] Joni Mitchell, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, 1977
[xlvi] Joni Mitchell, Turbulent Indigo, 1994
[xlvii] Bob Dylan, Dylan, 1973.