Meet John Ansell, the Word Man

If you read last month’s Martinborough Star you will probably have had a smile and a chuckle over the first of John Ansell’s poems. John promises one each month for the foreseeable future, so he undoubtedly qualifies as Martinborough’s poet in residence. His work also currently features on the front windows of Kitchener’s Dairy and the library, so do enjoy them as you pass by.

John came over the hill early in the year, and it’s his first encounter with life in a country town, although he was “sentenced to Rathkeale for three years in the mid 70s”. The slower pace of life but with “all the mod cons,” including the hot chocolate at Kitchener’s which he describes as “the quality of Wellington’s best and twice the quantity,” is proving very agreeable.

Until recently, John’s career was in political and radio advertising. However, he became weary of “putting lots of effort in and having it hacked about by the middle men”.  He is also a polished and amusing public speaker who relishes any opportunity to exercise “dances with words”, revealing the “use, abuse, origins and absurdity of the world’s craziest language”. 

John believes that we don’t make enough of our language, we don’t think enough about it, many of us are terrible at explaining things, and we lack “good paper manners”. He is an advocate of plain English, making every word matter and avoiding bureaucratic and unnecessarily academic writing.
A man of words, John uses and exercises them with great skill. Meaningful, original, zany, abstruse, erudite, obscure, every one of John’s words is purposeful and chosen to express precisely what he intends to convey. That’s a rare talent in these days of limited vocabularies and the excruciating overuse of ‘like’ and ‘awesome’.

He is master of lo-o-ong words too. When I met him John was wearing a cap decorated with the longest word in Welsh (which runs fluently off his tongue), and with the smallest encouragement he will read his poem about the longest place name in the USA with 45 letters and an alarming number of occurrences of the letter ’g’. It seemed entirely natural that there should be a newspaper on the table with a crossword nearly finished, and unsurprising that John was the founding judge and word selector of the New Zealand Spelling Bee.

His poems are unashamedly in rhyme, and rhyme that employs a chatty tone set to an even beat, with a punch line. John’s approach is often to be “frivolous but entertaining and people will learn something along the way”.

While John prefers to concentrate on the happy side of life, he is not averse to having a go at sport, art, politics and tobacco companies. Whatever the topic though, talking with John or reading his poetry invariably results in a smile and a giggle, if not a downright guffaw  – and we could all do with a lot more of that.

Rachel McCahon