Ruth padel: 'writing needs connection to the outside world: a lot of it seems to get done when you're simply living'

All days are different; what's the same is that I spend hardly any time in my study. It's tiny. I love its turquoise walls and the window looking at flats across the road, but

there are piles of paper on the floor and waves of guilt from unanswered letters and I'm rarely there except to use the printer. I write at the kitchen table, on a sofa, in a traffic

jam, or in bed, looking out at the garden. Writing needs connection to the outside world and a lot of it seems to get done when you're simply living. Research is just a grand name for

things you'd do anyway because you need to know. My new book is dedicated to the wonderful, desperately needed Focus Homeless Outreach team in Camden, north London, where I live. I went

round Camden's homeless hostels, and haunted St Pancras Old church, one of the first sites of Christianity in England. I love our neighbourhood. Some people have been here for

generations, others are newer, like us, such as the Kurds in the corner shop, Greeks next door, Afghans selling vegetables. We moved here five years ago, to a house with a brutally bare

garden. Now it's green, full of trees and birds which make their way into a lot of poems. Music does that, too. A singing group meets near here one afternoon a month, but I can't

commit to rehearsals, as I often work in the evenings. Two days a week I teach creative writing at King's College London. No writing is possible those days, but I memorise poems on the

bus. I used to memorise while walking the dog. Now there's no dog, and it's the 168 to Holborn. Writing poems happens in two stages, which I think corresponds to using two sides of

the brain. It's like sculpting: first the imagination, then the chisel. The first stage is molten. You're alert to everything, inside and out. The whole world is your material:

malleable, like wet clay. This is the blessed stage, connected and open, but as vulnerable as a hatching butterfly. Anything can shatter it. Once you have a draft, you're a different

creature, ruthless, undeflectable, carving away what doesn't belong, like Michelangelo freeing the image from the stone. Words often become more important when you cut them,

mysteriously watermarking a line with their absence. Whole days go in a flash of redrafting, printing, scribbling corrections, printing again. Poets vary, but for me what's essential is

the dolphin-like move from page to screen, conscious to unconscious, and back. In physics, time and space are one. With poems, it's form and content; everything turns on the relation

between what the poem might be saying and the pattern in which it says it. You're after a fusion of the two. If I have a deadline, I may go to a cafe and turn off my phone. Being with

other people, alone, somehow accelerates the process, maybe because poems come from and speak to real life, yet each is a boundaried precinct, both of and not of the world. Like days, poems

differ. A poem about a tiger wrote itself in my head through a single day. It started when I was being driven round the gulf of Vladivostok to a deer farm where a tiger had dined. I got the

flow of vowel-sounds while examining tiger scratches on trees, and finished in an airline security queue. Another poem fought me for years. I kept simplifying, loosening, expanding and

shrinking. Here at home I wake early, go downstairs, make tea, looking out at the garden, and start work. The dark lantern of early morning reminds me of being a child, alone in my

granny's house with everyone asleep and the smell of peat on the air from last night's fire. Prosper Mérimée complained of his lover George Sand in an unromantic dressing gown at

dawn, "on her knees before the hearth with a candlestick beside her and a red madras around her head". Despite writing _Carmen_, he failed to understand that whatever you get up to

at night, in the morning what you do is stoke the fire and write.