As the man said (gloomily), nobody writes poetry when they're happy. Undeniably, many people take it up as therapy, though a glint of talent enables them to move on to bigger and better things. So I'll own up: despite having had my first piece published at the age of 11 (OK, in the school magazine, a cunning pastiche on Browning's My Last Duchess), I turned to poetry with a vengeance after divorcing my husband. The matter was compounded not long after with a big fat dose of unrequited love. Moving swiftly on (a good decade further on), I certainly never pictured myself ending up as coordinator of the Dead Good Poets Society in 1998. Yes, it's a tricky job and somebody's got to do it, though concentrating on administration uses up so much time and energy that it plays havoc with your creative side. But as we all know, it's not just poets who chorus ‘Art for Art's sake – money for God's sake.’

Now, it's one thing churning out poems in the privacy of your own home, but quite another jumping in at the deep end, or rather, up onto a stage, and declaiming them in front of a room full of other people. Admittedly, a bare half-dozen in the audience is even more alarming, but all performance poets have been there. Pity it wasn't at the same time, mind you, or it would have amounted to a decent-sized audience. What with location and locals (while playing away as it were) to contend with, and a liberal helping of stage fright, you begin to ask yourself: What on earth do you think you're doing?

My worst moment was a crash course in the classics. In 1992, invited to perform on national AIDS day, the set was to include my own work (mostly humorous) plus a lengthy, elegiac piece, written for the event by a man who'd been diagnosed HIV positive, to be read to the accompaniment of a taped compilation of Elgar's music (I still get shivers whenever I hear it). I'd never done anything like this before.