Monoprint by Andy Hayes @andyinfinity on Instagram
John Simmons describes how his poem grew out of the 26 radio series to incorporate 26 favourite words.
‘Favourite words’ has been a bit of an obsession for me since back in the 1990s. My client Waterstone’s ran a competition to find out ‘the nation’s favourite word’. People voted in bookshops and the people’s vote went for ‘Serendipity’. I’d voted for ‘Blimey’ and have felt the need to stay loyal to that childhood word ever since.
When 26’s Bloomsbury Radio programme ‘Why words matter’ began, I proposed that we should end each episode by asking panellists to state their favourite word. It seems interesting – and very 26 – that people should have an almost familial relationship to words. So, by the end of the first series, it turned out that exactly 26 people had been involved in the six programmes and had nominated 26 words. Serendipity, you might say…
Anyway I thought it would be fun to write a poem incorporating all these 26 words. I saw it as a nice writing challenge, so how did I set about it?
Looking through the list of 26 words there seemed no obvious theme emerging. But ‘just do it’ I often advise on writing courses. There were two words that seemed to raise their hands- Hello as a starting point, and penultimate as the last word but one. So, all that remained was to fill in the gap with phrases incorporating the remaining words into poetry with at least the vestige of meaning.
There was a tricky, unusual word apricity that I wanted to use early on. Amanda Dartford had proposed this in the first programme that I’d hosted – warm sunshine on a winter’s day. It suggested two directions: first the possibility of the poem reflecting changing moods through the words used, and secondly that those words might be linked to the seasons. If so, the poem might have four stanzas to reflect the four seasons. And the first stanza – drawing in sunshine, geesh, bitter-sweet, relevance, perfect – was soon formed, establishing a structure of six lines for each stanza and a poetic music based on a roughly similar syllable count for each line.
‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’ The second stanza needed to bring in words that could suggest spring – place, joy, bumblebee, liming, movement, oblong, voracious all sprang forward. and the meaning was connecting to the sheer joy of playing with words, and their subliminal effects, their ability to convey and influence feelings.
With the third stanza, summer, there was a sense of sinking into the torpor of heat as well as the longing to break free. Wanderlust set the tone, dragging with it portmanteau, counter-intuitive, barnacle and corrosion alongside thoughts of escape to the high seas.
The seasons roll around and autumn ushers in a mood of decline, things slowing down, while trying to retain optimism about the year to come. JP Muir’s choice of eudaimonia sent me diving into dictionaries for meaning and description, towards Plato and philosophical thoughts about happiness. Words such as allargando (musical term for slowing down), archipelago and lagoon kept the ocean link going, with a tactile hand on the tiller. Which just left my word Blimey, expressing surprise, as very nearly the last word.
Of course there were many edits along the way, and I make no grand claim for profundity. Except for this – I hope the poem expresses my belief in the pleasure to be gained from playing around with words, seeing how they relate to each other, often in unexpected ways. And perhaps – only connect – that is a large part of the meaning we all look for in life, an expression of ‘why words matter’.
If you’ve missed any of the Bloomsbury Radio broadcasts – six in the first season, Season 2 soon to get underway, please subscribe to 26’s Substack podcasts to catch up and to make sure you hear future episodes.
Words in italics were the 26 favourite words chosen by panellists.
Hello, she smiled and there was a soft apricity
in that smile, like sunshine on a winter’s day,
but the mood changed like a storm, ah geesh,
blustered by the bitter-sweet cloud of linguistic relevance
that perhaps was not there or could never be quite as perfect
as she wished for the snow-white so-right word.
Another time, another place, the world might be full
of the joy of spring, like a bumblebee buzzing
from flower to flower, liming with others imbibing
the beauty of blossom, nature’s symphonic movement
in four parts, square or oblong, voracious for the nectar
of language to fuel the story to its annual crescendo.
Summer comes and we can no longer resist the stirring
wanderlust that prompts us to pack our baggy portmanteau
of words in that desert motel where we had sweltered,
intending counter-intuitive as ever to explore deep oceans
where freedom surfs on waves like catamarans
until weighed down again by barnacles and corrosion.
Then we fall into autumnal decline, allargando,
adrift in doldrums of the archipelago, marooned in a lagoon,
on the lookout to point the way, hands on the tiller,
tactile as ever, holding our breaths for a breeze,
aspiring to eudaimonia, the good of all goods, as Plato once did –
believing Blimey to be, if not the last, at least the penultimate word.
– John Simmons