The Joni Mitchell Express

Hass cites a winter lyric by Joni Mitchell as the starting point for his musings on Stevens' "The Snow Man." That poem calls me to slow down, to be with. It's an unexpected call to intimacy in Stevens. The lines Hass quotes from "Blue" pushes away the moment the song writer describes. It watches other people cutting, putting, singing, rushing by her. Similarly, Mitchell's Court and Spark rushes her world past you. In the midst of all that motion, you feel the Doppler Effect. It's a high speed tour through Los Angeles, as packed with specific detail as Stevens. She's "listening to the sirens and the radio" rather than existing in all
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
in the sound of a few leaves,

which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind,
That is blowing in the same bare place.

I know her Los Angeles, where "everything comes and goes" at a dead stop on the 4-0-5, "running hehind the time." She describes her world as accurately as Stevens does his. In other works, the voice of her free man in Paris is as authentic as his Sunday Morning dreamer's restless contentment. But Mitchell's world has no signs at the end stops, no rests. His poem is one sentence. Her album is one phrase. Strange how both bear the counterpoint of melancholy.