Painting With Words and Music

by Will Elliot
Poetry Magazine
June 2000

"Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music" - Ezra Pound

Poetry and music share an common ancestry. For instance, Sappho, it is written, sang her poetry while accompanying herself on the lyre. Much of the poetry composed during the Middle Ages was written specifically to be sung. Such poets as Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, and William Blake employed the ballad stanza form. In fact, the word "lyric" refers to a typically lucid and simple or direct category of poetry, often representational of music in its sound patterns.

Though Joni Mitchell may appear, at first glance, a curious (if not unorthodox) "classic poet," many of her lyrics transcend the banality of popular music, reaching a poetic depth ripe with keen observation, and bold imagery. Mitchell credits her love of words to both her mother, Myrtle Anderson, who recited Shakespeare to Mitchell as she was growing up, and to a seventh grade teacher, Mr. Kratzman, who, upon learning of the young Mitchell’s love for painting, told her, "if you can paint with a brush then you can paint with words."

A poet, painter, musician, and songwriter, Mitchell is a preeminent Renaissance woman, influencing an entire generation of songwriters. Mitchell has devoted much of her artistic life to chronicling the emotional ebbs and flows of the human heart. Her lyrics have been compared to the poems of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.

But it is a comparison at which she bristles. "I don’t like a lot of poets, and that seems to annoy people, that I’m dismissive of a lot of what they think of as great poetry," she said, in a 1997 interview with Stephen Holden. "I’m with Nietzsche on the poets: ‘The poet is the vainest of the vain, even before the ugliest of water buffalo does he fan his tail. I’ve looked among them for an honest man and all I’ve dredged up are old gods’ heads. He muddies his waters that he might appear deep.’"

What always bugged me about poetry in school was the artifice of it. When Dylan wrote, 'You've got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend,' as an opening line, the language was direct and undeniable. I love Yeats. As for Plath and Sexton, I'm sorry, but I smell a rat. There was a lot of guile in the work, a lot of posturing. It didn't really get down to the nitty-gritty of the human condition. And there was the suicide-chic aspect."

Born Roberta Joan Anderson, in 1943, in Alberta, Canada, , Mitchell grew up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. In 1963, she entered art school in Calgary. There, she taught herself to play ukulele and played regularly in Calgary’s coffeehouses, earning a reputation as a strikingly inventive songwriter.

By 1964, unwed and pregnant, Mitchell dropped out of art school. Concealing her condition from her parents, Mitchell moved to Toronto. Because she was "penniless and unemployed," Mitchell gave up her daughter to an adoption agency. Mitchell then met and married fellow musician, Chuck Mitchell.

After her marriage to Chuck Mitchell disintegrated, Mitchell moved to Greenwich Village and began playing regularly in the coffeehouses and clubs around Bleeker Street. Soon, celebrated folk singers, such as Tom Rush and Judy Collins, began recording Mitchell’s songs. By 1968, Mitchell had released her debut album, "Joni Mitchell/Song To A Seagull."

A prolific and restless artist, Mitchell produced more albums, including "Clouds" (1969), "Ladies Of The Canyon" (1970), "Blue" (1971), and "For The Roses" (1972). By the time she released her sixth album, "Court And Spark," in 1974, Mitchell found herself at the forefront of the confessional singer- songwriter-movement. "Court and Spark" was heralded by critics as a near miraculous synthesis of folk, rock, and jazz idioms. Rolling Stone Magazine crowned her the "Queen of Rock."

But it was a crown she would only briefly wear. As she began exploring jazz and world music on subsequent albums, such as "The Hissing Of Summer Lawns" (1975), "Hejira" (1976), and "Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter" (1977), Mitchell’s popularity waned. In 1978, legendary jazz composer Charles Mingus, who was dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease, asked Mitchell to write lyrics for Six compositions he had written.

Critics universally slammed the resulting album, "Mingus," released in 1979, six months after Mingus’ death. "I was warned by management that it ("Mingus") would cost me and it did. The musicianship on that album is at a very high level," Mitchell said, "but it hammered the nail into my coffin. It was viewed as an act of heresy by the rock and roll community, as an act of exploitation by the jazz community… it took many years to build back from that."

In the ensuing years, Mitchell released several albums, including "Wild Things Run Fast" (1982), "Dog Eat Dog" (1985), "Chalk Mark In A Rainstorm" (1988) and "Night Ride Home" (1991). Recently, Mitchell has received several prestigious awards, including two Grammy Awards for her 1994 album, "Turbulent Indigo," Billboard’s "Lifetime Achievement Award," and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 1996, she received the distinguished Polar Music Prize, in Stockholm.

Though she is best known for such compositions as "Both Sides, Now," "Chelsea Morning," "The Circle Game," "Big Yellow Taxi," and "Woodstock," Mitchell’s more obscure work is often her most hypnotic.