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

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.