Award-winning poet Ruth Padel emphasises the importance of reading widely and curiously
© Jemimah Kuhfeld
Ruth Padel is a prize-winning British poet and a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Zoological Society of London. In 1984 she gave up teaching Classical Greek at Oxford, Kings College Cambridge and Birkbeck College London to focus on writing poetry. She has since published seven collections of poetry, most recently Darwin - A Life in Poems.
What made you become a writer?
I wrote my first poem when I was three. Writing and reading always seemed the best way of dealing with the world. They came and went; at sixteen, then not till I was 21, but I didn’t read contemporary stuff till ten years later - I read the Elizabethans, Gerard Manley Hopkins, WB Yeats, WH Auden and Louis MacNeice, but I didn’t think about my own contemporaries, nor about publication, till I was in my late thirties.
What was your first poem about?
My first published poem was about the earliest map, a clay leaf from Babylon. It won a Commended in the National Poetry Competition; I was in hospital having my daughter. I was 39.
How did you make the transition from teaching Classical Greek to writing poetry, and then writing non-fiction?
I was thinking about poetry all the time anyway, because I was working on the first great poems of the Western canon: Homer, Sappho, Aeschylus, Sophocles. So it seemed to me a natural transition. But I also wrote a PhD on Classics, so I was always writing criticism too.
Did you face much rejection initially?
I didn’t try sending individual poems out, so I didn’t know about all that. I waited till I had a collection. Then I was very grateful to John Welch, of the Many Press, who said yes, he’d do a pamphlet. It was 1985. I was amazed and delighted. The other presses had all said things like: “Promising, but can’t quite…”
John helped me a great deal, not least in self esteem.
How did it feel to win the UK National Poetry Competition?
Fantastic! I was in a bar with poet Don Paterson, and was told to ring the Poetry Society. I couldn’t believe it. It was the only year they allowed long poems, and I think the long ones are often my best.
I am judging that competition this year and have been asked to say what effect it has on a writer. Incalculable, I’d say. Not just the attention it gives your work, but the sense that they liked this poem anonymously, out of thousands. Above all, it gives you belief in your own work.
You’ve been a writer in residence for National Poetry Day, South Bank, for Ledbury Poetry Festival, and for Poetry Proms. What does being a writer in residence involve?
It’s different in different places. At Ledbury is meant being available for people – I did a week of workshops in how to read poems. You can’t write poems well without reading other people’s poems constantly; and trying to read better and better too.
How does writing poetry compare to writing non-fiction?
It’s more fun! You lose yourself in a poem – for three or four days you think of nothing else. Non fiction is more of a slog.
What do you find the most challenging aspects of writing poetry?
Doing it newly, pushing it further, discovering…
What do you enjoy most?
The same as the challenges: doing it newly, pushing it further, discovering
Whose writing do you admire?
So many! We live in a very varied, imaginative age. The photographer who took this picture of me, Jemimah Kuhfeld, who loves poetry and reads it a lot, is doing a very original project, a kind of modern poetic “web of influence”.
She takes photos of poets and asks them to nominate another whose work they have been influenced by. I nominated Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon and Jo Shapcott, but there are loads of others. Particularly at present David Harsent, Alice Oswald and Ian Duhig. Then you go further back and there’s Bishop, Plath, all the usual suspects…
What inspires you?
History, music, painting; things people say, things I read and see. Ideas, images, dreams, relationships. Above all, how people make things - that’s an enduring inspiration, often under the surface of my poems, but is usually there. I’m fascinated by the technicalities involved when people make anything. Radio technicians, or photographers.
I loved watching Jemimah work, for instance. She’s brilliant at photographing poets: I was interested in how she found technical ways of expressing empathy with each poet’s individual mix of reticence and flamboyance.
Where do you carry out the majority of your writing?
Anywhere, At home, often on my bed. In a cafÈ, on a plane or a trainÖ
How did you come to be the judge of the Mslexia Annual Poetry Competition? What will you be looking for from entrants?
They asked me! I love Mslexia. I’ll be looking for imagination and surprise, poems with an energy and movement, saying something that hasn’t been said before.
What advice would you offer an aspiring poet?
Read read read, widely, and curiously. Not just poetry, but lots and lots of poetry. Critically. And find a poet whose voice you admire, whose project feels good to you, and try and work out what you admire about it – watch for the tricks and sly surprises the poems spring, how they tick.
What are you working on at the moment?
A novel revolving around the King Cobra. I was halfway through a collection before Darwin - A Life in Poems
torpedoed me. Now I can go back to that.
For more see www.ruthpadel.com
If you’re interested in buying any of Ruth’s collections, visit Amazon.co.uk
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