Joni Mitchell is a poet whose time has come because she uses the vehicle of music, for her words and thoughts to reach out to countless minds. With Joni there is no restriction of reading or schooling; she sings her poetry and brings it to the people.

In the past year, Joni has emerged as a major force in music. Her songs, once the exclusive privilege of a few to hear has become catchwords for many.

No longer is she only known to the few connoisseurs who read album credits, as the author, instead her creations are sought after and her work applauded.

Her songs are reflections of a very feminine way of looking at life, All too seldom in music, and indeed in any art form, is the female view of the world set down. Joni does just that.

One critic suggested that women think in a complicated manner and speak in simple terms. This could certainly be said of Joni's material, but her simplicity reveals a sensitivity and awareness that few composers possess today. With phrases like, "know that I will know you" and "while she's so busy being free" we are given an entire picture of a woman's mind and heart at work.

Joni has been seeing situations and storing them in her memory and in her music since her birth in Canada some 25 years ago. She had originally wanted to be an artist, a desire she still retains. Interestingly enough most of her musical objectives relate directly to a painter's vocabulary - "umbrella's bright in a grey background." Joni describes her home as a "musical one" and her interest in writing was there since she was nine.

But the single folk singer was on the way out - rock was coming in, and managers figured with a Joan Baez and Judy Collins, who needed a Joni Mitchell?

Fortunately, fellow folk singer Tom Rush heard Joni's songs and introduced her material to his following and also to Judy Collins. The end result: she was invited to sing at the Newport Folk Festival and Miss Collins recorded "Both Sides Now" and "Michael From Mountains" which proved to be highly successful for Judy Collins, and obviously for Joni.

Joni's present manager, Elliott Roberts, brought her to the attention of Reprise Records. Her first album, "Song to a Seagull, enjoyed moderate success, rendering her, an "underground find", as is the bourgeois hippie affectation of the day. With "Clouds", Joni's second album, it was evident that she possessed enduring talent.

When "Ladies of the Canyons" peered out on the record store shelves, Mitchell had moved from "underground find" to "must have" for she was moving up the ladder of mass attention. Each album provided more music enhancing the presentation of the songs, along with the addition of well known musicians, yet, through these progressive stages, Mitchell remained a loner.

"I used to be in a duo and that was the last time i played with anyone else, except for my friends. I like Graham (Nash) and Judy (Collins) but we sing together for fun,"

"I flat pick my music and I know where there are places to be filled in. There could be more texture to it. When I finger pick, I play the melody line and in many cases that's the way it stays. When I've finished a song, I've honed it to a point where it is a completed song to me, and anything that is added, might to other people, sound better, more complete, but to me, it sounds extraneous." Mitchell prefers to control what she creates.

"I'm very serious about my music and so I like that seriousness to remain. When I play with other people, I like that to be for fun. It's on another level .... a looser level, where a sense of my own imperfections doesn't enter into it because it's just for my own pleasure. it would be difficult for me now, to learn to play with other people, like teaching an old dog new tricks."

Until "Ladies of the Canyon", Joni's melodies have emphasized her past association with folk music: simple, straightforward, they encompassed little of what rock has brought to the music scene. Her present association with rock musicians has somewhat liberated Joni from the confines of the folk idiom. You can hear that change in "Ladies." "I guess there will just come a time when I'm hearing more music than I am able to play and then the change will come about naturally to align myself with other musicians to complete the work.

Joni does not see adding musicians as back up men as a step toward co-writing. "I don't think I could do that for the same reasons I can't play professionally with other people. I know what colors I want to use, I'm too opinionated... no that's not the word I want. It's just that I feel too strongly about what the finished thing should be whether it's music or a painting. How many times do you hear about painters working together? The Fool are three painters who paint together, but how many times do you hear of that? I feel very much about my music like I feel about my painting. If I were working for a master and he came up to me and said, 'Well, if you put a brush stroke of red in that corner, you'll save it.' I would have to reject his way of saving it or improving it until I could find a solution of my own which was equally right."

Joni's strong desire to be independent and an entity unto herself, can seem at times, a contradiction with her own gentleness and music. However, it somehow isn't. Early on Joni was criticized for being too feminine, too romantic ("secrets and sharing sodas, that's how our time began.") But just how a woman can be too feminine isn't really clear to Joni who sees the lack of womanliness in her contemporaries as one of the worst aspects of progress..

"I think there's a lack of romance in everything today. I went to see the film version of 'Romeo and Juliet' which is supposed to be the epitome of romance and I thought it was very unromantic. Everything was too perfect. I think that women are getting a bum deal. I think we are being misguided. It's just follow the leader. Like for a long time I wouldn't go out without wearing my false eyelashes because I thought that without them I was plain. You know, that's really silly, isn't it? But that is what happened. "

"Now she rallies her defenses for she fears that one will ask her for eternity...." (Cactus Flower).

"There's the fear of the big hurt, we're taught to be very cool. and be noncommittal. That's the thing about places like Italy. Like they're encouraged to say, 'oh I love you my darling and then if it doesn't work out they all say 'poor little Emilio his heart is breaking and nobody puts him down. You know they're all very kind, they shelter him because he's mourning openly for the loss of someone, whereas in America, you stifle that so much... well, anything that is repressed and goes underground really gets distorted. You don't know what you want after a while, if it is repressed."

"Sometimes in the evening he would read to her, roll her in his arms." (Blue Boy)"

"Even if I'm writing about myself, I try to stand back and write about myself as if I were writing about another person. From a perspective I wrote this one song, I can't remember the name of it now, a triangular story, where I wrote about myself from the point of view of another woman. It's written about one person and myself and still another rolled into one. To give the person more dimensions. It's really tough because I want to explain to you how I write, but I can't. It's just standing back and getting another perspective on it. I step back and carry on a conversation with myself. It's almost schizophrenic. You lay out a case and argue with yourself about it and with no conclusions. But I have to write a long time after something has happened because when I'm in the middle of something, I'm totally emotional and blind, I can't get a perspective on it."

"I asked him would he hurry but he crawled the canyons slowly thru the buyers and sellers" (Nathan La Franeer)

Like many poets, Joni insists that her lyrics be worked over until every word is absolutely necessary and cannot be altered. She admires both Dylan and Leonard Cohen, each for their differences. "Leonard's economical, he never wastes a word. I can go through Leonard's work and it's just like silk. Dylan is coarse and beautiful in a rougher way. I love that in him. I think I'm a belated fan, at least my enthusiasm is growing the longer I live in urban places. The last two years have made me a strong fan; but before I lived in cities I couldn't see what he meant. I'd never known what the street meant. I was sheltered I didn't seen the injustices. Now I understand him."

Her ability to understand and transform has made her almost a legend in the United States. Critics and listeners alike rhapsodize over her songs and her psyche. She is fulfilling something of a "goddess" need in American rock, a woman who is more than a woman; a poet who expresses a full range of emotions without embarrassment.

Her legend is beginning to obscure her work, because she is virtually without competition (Joan Baez and Judy Collins don't have the output; Buffy Saint Marie doesn't have the immediate newness); she is without comparison. Her work for now, goes almost totally without question, without debate, overshadowing those who seemed destined to remain in the forefront of the music seeking public.

"Now I play if you have some money or if you're a friend to me." (For Free)

Success has worked its hardships on Joni's life as well. With sold out concerts comes demands on personal time and involvement. After "Ladies of the Canyon" she split to Greece for sun and silence. She said she needed the time to be alone and find her creativity again.

Her house, redwood and hand-honed, sits high in Laurel Canyon (Los Angeles) empty and waiting. One of her many treasures within the house is a grandfather clock which refuses to tick ... "it is too old to be repaired and it stands idle, useless and beautiful." That in itself tells us as much about the lady as anything she might write.

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.
(Woodstock)