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Inspirations

MAKING A POEM: Ruth Padel

Interviewed by Colette Bryce

The Forest, the Corrupt Official
and a Bowl of Penis Soup

How can I paint Winter Landscape with Temples
and Travellers, or Five-Colour Parakeet

on Blossoming Apricot Tree?
The oracle boxes are empty

and the Minister with a Brief for Charming Explanation
has signed a licence (to the army) for the forest to be cut,

ordered satin linings to his red kimono
and is drinking with the General

in what he says is the best restaurant in town,
attended by two fifteen-year-old girls:

handpicked, translucent brown jade.
Black tree stumps cool on the mountain,

sawmills slide out planks a hundred an hour
and white ash blooms over the river

while the courtier treats the General
to tiger-penis soup, five hundred linu a bowl.

I’ll paint the bare burnt mamillated plain,
Flame of the Forest in its white and scarlet,

jack fruits and jacaranda, the stag in the sky
and the naming of stars, the three definitions of twilight

in Yunnan province where white-handed gibbons
used to sing their love duets.

I’ll paint the truth of illusion, a glossary
of atmospheric optics,

and Guanyin, Guardian of Compassion.
I’ll pay particular attention to her smile.

The ancient Chinese artists…

…did a lot of paintings about nature. They would go up into the mountains and they really adored nature as it is. They painted the tiger being itself, you know, ‘tiger being happy,’ ‘tiger in bamboo’ sort of thing, wonderful titles. And there were painters who added poems about making the painting, so these poems about painting a tiger were actually part of the painting of a tiger.

And now, in a way…

…it's the Chinese market that is driving the tiger to extinction – tiger bone, tiger skins and so on – and tiger penis is only a part of it. I felt that the Chinese had betrayed their art, and also their tigers.

I was driving over terrible mountain roads…

…and the generator fell out of our vehicle so we stopped and there was a three hour wait, or more, and not even a mobile signal. I sat down by the side of the road and pulled out my laptop and I had these wonderful ancient Chinese poems on it. This poem started there.

The speaker is a Chinese painter…

…and he’s looking for his traditional subjects to paint, and of course they are lost. So he will have to paint the loss, in a way. But it became me, looking for what I was trying to find, the hiding tiger. It’s both me and this painter, whoever he was.

When I travelled round Asia for five years…

…talking to scientists and conservationists, they were staring into the heart of disaster. They know what is happening and that it’s irreversible.

It’s all about corruption.…

…The politician is selling the forest to the army to make money. Then you get the Viagra stuff, the fifteen-year-old girls and tiger penis soup, etcetera. But really I think the poem is about the artist as witness, what you’re witness to. You can’t do your traditional subjects, you can’t do your traditional nature poetry, you know, the daffodils and all the rest of it, because now when we look at anything to do with nature what we are basically looking at is threat.

Poems should be able to be about.…

…anything. In the Penguin Book of Home Brewing and Wine-making I picked up once, it says you can actually make wine out of the leather of old shoes. You can ferment something out of anything, and a poet should be able to make anything into a poem.

If I’m not writing.…

…I’ll go for a walk in the forest, or on Hampstead Heath – preferably somewhere with trees. Trees, I think, would be my advice to anyone: get near trees! Get in there, get under, look up at the flicker of light above you.

RUTH PADEL is an award-winning poet and author whose books include 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and Tigers in Wet Weather. Her most recent book is Darwin: A Life in Poems, out now.

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