RUTH PADEL

Ruth Padel was born in London. She invented the 'Sunday Poem' discussion column for The Independent on Sunday, on which her book, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (2002), is based. She's published six poetry collections: Summer Snow (1990); Angel (1993 - a Poetry Book Society Recommendation); Fusewire (1996); Rembrandt Would Have Loved You (1998 - a Poetry Book Society Choice); Voodoo Shop (2002 - a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award); and The Soho Leopard (2004 - a Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Award). Her website is www.ruthpadel.com, and you can also find out more about her on the Contemporary Writers website.

This interview took place at the beginning of August 2006, with questions put by visitors to EnCompass, and the site's Reader in Residence, Susan Tranter. 

Susan Tranter: Ruth, may I begin by asking what you've been reading recently, and if there's anything in particular you'd recommend to EnCompass readers?

RP:  The book that won the Independent Foreign Fiction Award recently, Out Stealing Horses. Brilliant writing and feeling. Stephen Mitchell’s translations of Rilke are obsessing me at the moment, that’s the poetry I’m reading; also listening to a tape of Anton Lesser reading Milton’s Paradise Lost; reading voices vary but his is fantastic. I’m reading Salman Rushdie’s latest collection of essays, Step Across This Line: he is so intelligent and funny and acute and you learn so much about writing. Colin Tudge’s The Secret Life of Trees is fantastically imaginative. And I keep re-reading Beckett’s Molloy, over and over. There’s all of life in there; and of writing.
 
Shamshad: Hello Ruth. I'm curious about whether you sit down and think 'I'm starting work on poems for a new collection' - and therefore perhaps have certain prevailing themes in mind, or whether you just write poems and then when there are enough of them, you collect them up into a book. How does it usually work for you?

RP: Hi Shamshad - the second! After finishing a collection you feel drained, will I ever write a poem again? sort of thing. For example, after The Soho Leopard, which was third in a sequence of three quickly written books, from Rembrandt Would Have Loved You and The Voodoo Shop, that feeling was very strong. Also I was working on Tigers in Red Weather, which was very hard thinking and reading as well as writing, plus chairing the Poetry Society, redrafting the constitution and dealing with members’ concerns, answering their letters; that took an amazing amount of time. So the poems that gradually turned up came slowly, I had to fight for time to write and think them. 
Eventually, after eight or nine poems are done that you feel work OK, you begin to see you are mining a new seam and get a bit of a feel for what it is. Usually, in the past anyway, it is after about twenty poems that you realize what the central image is, what you are after. At that point, know more what you are listening for and opening yourself to; where your intuition or imagination (or whatever it is) is taking you.
I think that collections of poems that are written to a preconceived plan don’t work. It has to be organic, to come from within the work, and you have to follow what the poems are doing. If you think, THIS IS MY NEW COLLECTION the thing is doomed.  The prime important act is writing one poem because the poem wants and needs to get written.

Michael D: Is it true that Ruth is related to Charles Darwin? I'd be fascinated to know if this has influenced her work in any way!

RP: My grandmother Nora Barlow was his grand-daughter, born after he died; she edited his autobiography and letters, and started the Darwin archive at Cambridge. She was always important to me (there’s a lot about that, and about her house and the garden around it, in the early chapters of Tigers). My daughter is called after her cousin, Gwen Raverat, whose memoir of a Darwin childhood is called Period Piece. Until I started working on tigers, I hadn’t noticed that this Darwin thing had influenced my work. But when I travelled for the tigers I took Darwin with me and have now written quite a lot on him (there are a couple of essays on him on my website) and The Soho Leopard was very influenced by his image of 'tangle', of the interdependence of all life forms.  
 
HDF: I read Ms Padel's book 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, and found it very useful, as well as a good read. I'd like to know if she feels it's part of her role as a poet to help elucidate the poetic process and the wider reading experience?

RP: I’m really glad you enjoyed reading it as well as finding it useful. I am just finishing a follow-up called The Poem and the Journey, coming out in January, but I don’t think I will ever write about poetry again - I think with this one I have shot my bolt. I don’t think it’s my role as a poet to help elucidate, it’s just something I seem to be able to do. Some poets do, some don’t. I care very much about what reading is, and helping people to do it: I think I just really like giving people poems, whether on stage in a reading, or on the page. My father was a teacher, before he was a psychoanalyst, and education is burnt into my bones, I think. But The Poem and the Journey (there’s stuff about it on my site) has taken a year and a half of twelve-hours-a-day work that left no time for new work of my own; and that’s enough.  
 
Nigel Beale: Here's a question I've been pondering. One of the things I admire most about Shakespeare is his entrepreneurial spirit. Philip Larkin suggests that Shakespeare’s prosperous career was achieved '…by writing plays that pleased his audiences; and if we speculate what his plays would have been like if he hadn’t had to please them, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they wouldn’t have been as good.' I buy into this thesis, however, Shakespeare’s Sonnets sit among the greatest poems ever written, and I’m not sure they were fired by this marketplace imperative. What are your thoughts on subsidizing poets?
 
RP: A jumble. There is interesting stuff in C.K. Stead’s book The New Poetic, which is largely on T.S. Eliot – about the relation between the poet and the audience. He suggests that when the audience stand too close to the poet and the poet writes to their demands, poetry then feels the need to get away and push the audience away; when they are too far off, poetry beckons them in again. And the money aspect has a crucial role in that. From Pindar onwards, poets have complained about other poets getting paid more, themselves not being paid enough. Theatre is different from sonnets; it involves more people, and therefore more money, to deliver to an audience. I think there is a balance between addressing those around you, and writing what you have to write. And all of us have to juggle the money into that balance.
Sorry that’s not a very coherent answer. I like commissions, they provide a challenge – to make the subject your own; and sometimes the important poems come out of a commission. But I don’t ever like the feel of being owned, I’d always shy away from that, even if I can’t afford to buy my daughter a pizza.
 
Anya: Is there a contemporary poem that you would have liked to have written yourself?

RP: Lots! But they are written in those poets’ voices, and you can’t want to be another poet and write their poems, what you want is to take your own thing forward. Working on The Poem and the Journey, where the readings are more detailed than 52 Ways, has taught me a lot. It starts with Donaghy’s poems 'Machines'; it has a wonderful poem by W.S. Graham; 'January 1st 1502' by Bishop which is a fantastic poem; Duhig’s 'The Lammas Hireling', Czeslaw Milosz’s 'Orpheus and Eurydice'; Kathleen Jamie’s 'Frogs'… They are all brilliant and I love them intimately. But I want to learn from them rather than wish I had written them.

David Richards: I read a story by Ruth Padel in Prospect magazine and enjoyed it very much - I wonder if she is planning to write more short (or long!) fiction?
 
RP: Thanks a lot David – in the end, that story turned into Tigers in Red Weather, an autobiographical travel true-life adventure, but I have written some others, mostly for radio. I like the freedom of prose fiction, I’m working on it!

Loulou: I am a fan of Ruth's poems. What I like most is the passionate depth that not many women poets seem willing to convey these days. Does Ruth think that passionate or erotic writing is a dying art? Or can she recommend any other writers?
 
RP: Thank you. I hope it’s not dying. I don’t see a difference, in fact, between being passionate about an idea and passionate about a person; and maybe about language too. I’d say Jo Shapcott has very passionate depth, her poetry is all about the body, but in a completely different way. Or Selima Hill.
Might it that the passion really starts in relation to language, and so when erotic or passionate writing works it is because the fresh, energetic relation of the words to each other becomes a natural image for the relation between bodies and people to each other? As Jeanette Winterson said in her novel The Passion, what matters is having a passion, doesn’t matter what it is.

Susan Tranter: On that note, can I close the interview by asking what you're working on at the moment?

RP: I’m just doing the final edit of The Poem and the Journey (And Sixty Poems to Read Along the Way) which is out in January. I’ve also got coming out my edition of Tennyson: an introduction and notes to the Folio Society edition of Tennyson which took a lot of research and was completely fascinating; we think of him as a boring old monument but my God he was an innovator, and had some very tough times when he didn’t publish at all, he was so wounded by critical reactions; and is in some ways a very dark poet. I learned a lot from that – the edition will be out in September.  
I am writing poems, some quite political; and also investigating images of animal migration and human immigration, with their biological and political resonances. Also writing a prose book about – sorry – king cobras. I know this sounds nuts but they are animals of the earth, and endangered, mythically extraordinarily rich. And I find them fascinating. You can’t help where your imagination leads you – all I know is that you have to follow it.

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