Ingmar Heytze on Joni Mitchell: 'Crushed at seventeen' #ILFU

'Stop it. The fewer awards people give each other, the better.' Ingmar Heytze, poet, is clear: 'There are already big enough prizes within every conceivable genre. If you ask me, they should limit that Nobel Prize to science from now on.'

So on the final night of the International Literature Festival in Utrecht (ILFU) next Saturday, it will be all about that Nobel Prize for Joni Mitchell. The programme reports that.  There, Heytze will read a story about Joni Mitchell together with Nelleke Noordervliet and up-and-coming talent Jordi Lammers. Mathilde Santing will perform songs from the Joni Mitchell programme she is currently touring the country with.

Mitchell is one of those artists who, after her fame in the 1970s, continued to work hard and continue to develop. Though she no longer attracts those crowds she gathered with her first albums. Ingmar Heytze first became acquainted with Mitchell's work during a study trip to Rome. As a seventeen-year-old.

We went sometime in spring, so there's about thirty years between then and now. I had a Walkman with me with one tape in it, which due to wear and tear, stretching and batteries of dubious quality, began to float and rustle more and more, but oddly enough, this only made it sound better.'

Crushed

'On the tape was the album Court & Spark, which still crushes me. I think I had recorded it myself from a record in the music library, but I don't really remember who gave me the idea. I won't have come up with it on my own, because at that age I was more into more solid music - although I always liked good lyricists like Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson too, whom I had no doubt come to know through my sister.'

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Hetze finds the question in the ILFU programme booklet about this Nobel Prize for Mitchell of little interest. Although it seemed different for a while, he admits: "When it was announced that Dylan would get that prize, I sent out a tweet - I tweet once a month, I believe - saying: "I think it's a good idea, then the prize will finally become a little better known." That just goes to show how dull I find the drivel about the Nobel Prize. I think people who were against it at the time also often argued that after Bob Dylan the gate would be closed, because many more famous songwriters would be eligible.

A lot foggier

'It's that Leonard Cohen is dead by now, that saves one more dyed-in-the-wool candidate, but there are plenty of them left, including very definitely Joni Mitchell, but still also Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Neil Young... That Joni Mitchell would have more claim to the prize than Dylan seems nonsense to me. Her lyrics might be more literary, but in many ways also a lot more foggy. I'd say: first Randy Newman, then we'll talk further.'

'But actually, I think the whole question of who is more entitled to what is already wrong. Getting an award is not a right. It is usually the outcome of a jury deliberation from which even the members themselves do not know what comes out and why. The laureate is fished out of a grab bag in which a number of candidates of name and fame were also included.'

Inalienable

Some people argue that Joni Mitchell's music and poetry cannot be separated in any way. So that it would be inappropriate to give her an award for one but not the other. Heytze disagrees: 'It's fine to give someone an award for one aspect of his work, by doing so you don't say anything boring about other aspects. But I do agree it the thrust of the statement, her music and lyrics largely belong together inalienably, it is a universe in itself.'

Heytze himself has often worked with combinations of poetry and music. For him, how do lyrics differ from poems? 'Simply put, the answer is: 'Song lyrics are half-products. They only come alive to music. Poems have their own music with them. That's why a poem only needs a reader.' But that is too short of the mark. Not for nothing did Gerrit Komrij call breath and music 'the natural parents of poetry.' In fact, a poet like Willem Wilmink thought the difference between poems and songs was completely artificial.'

No high art

"Famous quote: 'When Eddy Christiani sings "My rear tyre is a bit soft, but that doesn't matter dear doll, just jump on behind, jump on behind", he doesn't have a bicycle with him and that's why it's literature.' I wouldn't go that far, but I myself particularly like songwriters who are also poets, and vice versa - who, in short, don't care so much about the difference.'

'By the way, people who want to know whether a particular song is a poem usually mean by that: aren't song lyrics high art, like poetry? The answer to that has to be a strong NO. Because poetry is not high art. Poetry is what you are left with when you have removed all the other functions of a text. There is nothing high or low about that. What you have to ask yourself per song lyric: can someone who does not know the music and the singer read this lyric as a poem? Are such song lyrics also poems? Well and truly. Especially Joni Mitchell's.

Woodstock

The question remains whether the Utrecht-based poet can still pinpoint a real highlight in Mitchell's work. 'It's too much' he says. 'Just the albums Court & Spark and Hissing of the summer lawns qualify in their entirety. Let me choose the song 'Woodstock': to write the most famous song about the most famous pop festival ever, without ever having set foot there yourself, that is high art.