The Friday Poem on 06/01/23
We chose ‘Chapwench’ by Jay Whittaker to be our Friday Poem this week. It’s a poem that breaks the poetry fourth wall — the narrator speaks directly out of the poem to tell us what she has chosen to include in the poem and what she has chosen to leave out. What she gives us is the unusual and evocative word ‘chapwench’, a word which her poet-mind recognizes as a gift, even if it was not meant as one. It’s a poem which celebrates the richness and the power of language, its ability to situate us in our own history and, at the same time, to bring us into our own creative poetry space.
Chapwench
Where do I start?
Not with the gut punch,
all my father said
after I came out.
I’ve deleted his slander from this page.
I choose not to repeat it.
Didn’t he apologise?
Don’t I have the last word?
It was the argument of my life,
and I had to win it.
When he called me chapwench —
I was part pole-axed,
part mesmerised by this archaism
as rich as my grandparents’ thee-ing and tha-ing —
a glimpse of a history
I needed to know.
Even in the throes of our fight,
I knew he’d given me a gift.
