The Ruth Padel Method From Interview no. 17 • Keep a quarry or running file of phrases and images. When something engages you or has a charge, add it to your file. • When you get the urge to write a poem, block it out roughly first, then go to your quarry to see if anything belongs. This is the modelling stage, when like a sculptor you’re gathering materials, working it up, adding the clay or wax until you get it all together. • Let yourself be led by how the words want to be; don’t pre-plan your poem or think too closely about what you’re doing. This is the initial stage when you let yourself pour out. • With your raw materials – the basic thing on the page – think of yourself as Michelangelo standing in front of a block of marble, looking to see where the image is imprisoned in the stone. Now you can begin to chip away and throw a lot out. • Try to get a feel for the poem, learn it by heart and recite it to yourself as you’re taking the dog for a walk (Byron used to compose on horseback). Listen and look at what you’ve made. If you don’t like it, it won’t sound well. • Keep working at the poem. Take a stiletto and point it at every word, every comma, every line break and ask yourself ‘are you adding to my poem, are you absolutely necessary?’ It will often take about 100 drafts before you get it to be the way you want it. • Build a file of the new poems you’re writing. After you finish a collection there is often a terrible blankness (‘will I ever write a poem again?’) and the poems you write at this stage may feel as if they want to belong to the old one. However, at some stage – probably not until you’ve written at least 15-20 – you may begin to see they’ve got an identity of their own and that they’re belonging to something new. Do they make a story? Is there some sort of progression? Is there a predominate image? • Start a new file with a working title for the collection to which you can add. • When organising the collection it may be helpful to find a central poem, a central line around which the poems cohere. Consider what poems you are going to exclude, the weaker ones, the ones that don’t fit. It’s useful to get a critical eye at this stage. • Aim to have at the end of the collection a poem that will take you out somewhere else. Take a stiletto and point it at every word, every comma, every line break and ask yourself ‘are you adding to my poem, are you absolutely necessary?'
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