Poetspeak: a self-reflection

by KATHERINE GALLAGHER
Poem: Poem for a Shallot
Published in: Tigers on the Silk Road (Arc Publications, 2000)

I'm at a 1997 Blue Nose Poets' poetry workshop on vegetables with Jo Shapcott. She's brought in trays loaded with carrots, broccoli, turnips, spinach, parsnips, aubergines, courgettes, onions, and quite a few shallots. There are also cookbooks and food dictionaries. We are to look for inspiration via one of the books or a vegetable of our choice. I look over the field, hesitate between a turnip and an aubergine before settling on a shallot.

Jo suggests we study our chosen legume – smell it, examine its surfaces, feel it, taste it, listen to it. My shallot stares back – small, insignificant, silent, one of many when on the tray, but now suddenly seeming to take on a life of its own. I have never studied a shallot so intensely and I'm starting to see its fine singularity in greater detail. In a sense, I'm no longer taking it for granted. What lies behind its papery, tanned, polished and streaked outer wall? I look back at the other shallots still on the tray, then at my chosen one. You are one of a multitude – my opening line. I flow-write around it – note its tough crackly shell, binding a mystery - self-contained, and indifferent to my musings. I keep writing, imagining walls and walls to be broken down, each skin a wall, endlessly secretive. I'm trying to edge my way through to the unknown. The inner heart . . .

After noting my progress so far, I start to peel back the papery brown skin, revealing folds, tidily packed together, fleshy and luminously white . . . One skin after another. Nature's protectiveness. By now I ‘m arriving at a stronger realization of the uniqueness of my shallot (this 'one of a multitude') and I find the lines: I am fooled. / You insist on the secret of skins – / how perfectly each wraps you. These lines come to me moreorless straight away and later, they become the beginning of the finished poem. Then as I peel back more of the interior of the shallot, its compartmentalizing seems increasingly remarkable, finished, and extremely confident. You compartmentalize,/I don't know how./I can peel you back to nothing.

This latter thought is a turning point, the recognition of a tension - of my power over the shallot but also of its power over me, for my eyes have started to water. And I think: Why am I doing this? It's like being in a relationship. Eyes watering, tears. Unhappy, negative. The shallot has moved from being an object under scrutiny to a metaphor for another being, a lover - a reluctant lover, one whose heart I can't win. I'm peeling back, hunting, layer upon layer, but after the peeling back, there's nothing (I've been hunting for ‘what isn't there'.) I have been fooled. Hence the lines: I hunt for what isn't there -/layer upon layer -/down to your cagey heart. By this time, in the tension crossover that occurs in poems, the original object (shallot)'s story suggests the deep sadness of a failed relationship where there's too much insisting and too much rejection, and where there are no winners; where cageyness is often the result. Following this, there is the final realization, with its attendant ironies, that every experience, even a failed relationship, leaves its mark. Hence, the ending:

When I try to get away/you've snuck into my breath, eyes,/making me cry/into my hands.

Poem for a Shallot was published in Southerly magazine (Australia), appeared in The Good Food Guide 2005 . (ed. Andrew Turvil, Which? Books), and also in my book Tigers on the Silk Road. After my initial notes, I didn't add a lot; it was more a question of cutting so as to achieve a lean effect, with sparse imagery and taut rhythms making for tension and dramatic effect.

 

Katherine Gallagher is an Australian poet, translator and creative writing
tutor resident in London since 1979. She is a widely-published poet;
her most recent collection is Tigers on the Silk Road (Arc Publications, 2000).
Gallagher was Co-organiser of the 2002 Palmers Green Stevie Smith Centenary Festival
and, that same year, was writer-in-residence at Railway Fields Nature Reserve,
Harringay, North London. Her latest collection, Circus-Apprentice ( 2006).
See her website, or email for further information.