Wild woman of poetry and scholar Ruth Padel tells Jane Wright why we all love verse

Tigers and Red Weather
by Ruth Padel Little Brown at £16.99

IF punk rocker Iggy Pop were an attractive female of the species, he’d look like Ruth Padel. They share the same animal sexiness: eyes of a hypnotic feline, snake hips and long dark hair.
Because Padel has played the cat among the poetic pigeons by putting Pop in her poetry, alongside Gordon’s gin and Ryanair.
Now here she is, the great great granddaughter of Charles Darwin, roaming her macaw-coloured kitchen in Lisburne Road, Hampstead, quite unapologetic.
She says: “I haven’t dreamt up Iggy Pop and consumerism. They’re in the real world, so poetry shouldn’t shut them out.”
Indeed, if anyone is qualified to proclaim poetry as the new rock ‘n’ roll, it’s Padel. A scholar of ancient Greek and former academic at Oxford, Cambridge and Bloomsbury’s Birkbeck College, she has also sung in an Istanbul nightclub and once wrote a book called I’m a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock ‘n’ Roll, which examined the links between rock music, modern masculinity and the violent heroes of Greek myths.
So the poet, who has been dubbed the sexiest in Britain, rapidly obliges: “Everyone has a poetry-shaped hole inside them,” she says.
“Sometimes they fill it with music, but when the crunch comes at a wedding or a funeral, people always say it with poetry.
“Except that today we’re a visual and not a literary culture, and we’ve forgotten how to read a poem.” To help, in 2002 Padel wrote 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem: How Reading Modern Poetry Can Change Your Life, based on her former newspaper column.
She continues: “Poetry changed a lot in the 1980s, when Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage came to prominence talking about the real world.
“Poetry also remains very important in societies under political repression, where it can say without actually saying, what could lead to torture and death. It mattered behind the Iron Curtain and in present day Burma.”
Yet Padel adds: “Poetry is a tough world. You’re only ever as good as your next poem and you have to do all sorts of other things to make a living. So I haven’t written a single poem since The Soho Leopard,” (her seventh collection, published last year).
Instead, just as she has battled to stop poetry dying out, her latest quest is to save the Asian tiger. Her prose conservation travelogue Tigers and Red Weather is published today (June 23).
She explains: “The tiger is the world’s favourite animal. It means power and sexiness. A couple of years ago, I’d just finished a long relationship and the tiger, just like a poem, pressed in on my consciousness.
“It was suddenly the thing I felt alive thinking about. Tigers are the emblems of wilderness, but they are also an umbrella species. They need hundreds of deer to feed off and the deer need enough plants to eat. So if the tiger is alright, it means everything else in the forest is okay too.”
Unfortunately, she adds, the title of the book, taken from a poem by Wallace Stevens, means “there’s tiger’s blood all over the place”. “They’re clubbed to death, electrocuted and poisoned to feed man’s hunger for traditional Asian medicine, which reaches as far as Soho.”
So off Padel went to the jungles of India and Nepal, to Siberia, Burma and Indonesia, to document the tiger’s fight for survival. “It was tough and scary,” she confides. “I’m a terrible wimp about kayaks and snakes.”
The irony of her enterprise has not escaped the descendant of Darwin. She says: “He journeyed around the South American jungles exploring biodiversity. Now here I am going round Asia seeing how everything is becoming extinct.
“But the animals depend on the political will of the countries they live in. And it would help if the world was led by someone more ecological than George Bush.”
So how deep does the influence of Darwin run?
She considers: “Well, everyone in the family was aware of him. But my fascination with the Indian forest is unexplainable. My favourite read as a child was always The Jungle Book.”
Padel the feminist laughs as she recalls: “When I was little, I wanted to be the black panther Bagheera. Then, when I got older, I wanted to marry him.” Back home in Hampstead she says ruefully: “The dog population’s too high for tigers on the Heath.” Yet she is fiercely loyal to the area. She grew up in Highgate, and lives with her 19-year-old daughter Gwen and her cocker spaniel Velvet.
Gwen went to school at Fitzjohn’s primary, then Camden School for Girls and is also an aspiring writer, although, her mum says “she avoids poetry for obvious reasons”.
Padel herself may not be able to avoid it for much longer. For one thing, she wants to write a follow up to 52 Ways.
For another, as the new chairman of the Poetry Society, she maintains not everything in the current garden of verse is lovely.
She says her tendency towards erotic poetry, particularly her coming of age collection Rembrandt Would Have Loved You (1998), which documents a passionate love affair “seemed innocent to me, but it was about the female not the male gaze”.
“Men have done it in poetry for ages, but me doing it upset people. I’m the only British woman poet to have a woman editor and men still control the publication of poetry, which is all the more surprising since the rest of publishing is full of very powerful women.”
So it seems, after the tigers, it’s time to turn her attention back to her own species again.
The poet confirms: “I always used to prefer animals to people. But I like people again now. Even editors.”