Okay, I can no longer keep my head below the parapet; I’m cross. I am a Middle Aged Woman and I write poetry. I’ve had many comments addressed to me in person on the subject over the years, eg: ‘Unfortunately there are too many Middle Aged Women on the poetry scene’, or ‘This poem will go down well given all the Middle Aged Women who read poetry’, ‘That reading was full of Middle Aged Women’, or ‘Workshops are mostly made up of Middle Aged Women’ (why shouldn’t they be?). The term always sounds so loaded and is bandied about with a certain scorn. From the way some people talk, and from various postings on the internet with regard to demographics, I’m starting to feel as if there is some sort of active discrimination against me by virtue of my age and gender. Why? I’m only trying to do the best job I can, using my hard-earned skills and life experience and working at what I do.

I’m not part of some imagined horde of frustrated ex-housewives whose kids have left home and who take up poetry as a hobby or distraction in the way that others might take up flower arranging or origami, tolerated as make-weights in poetry workshops and as buyers of poetry books. (Although where would the poetry world be without its older audience? Maybe they stick at it because they have more patience than a younger one?) It all makes me see some some nightmare vision of herds of stampeding menopausal women in aprons and curlers storming the bastions of verse, demanding that their amateurish offerings about cookery, periods and ballroom dancing become part of the cannon (and incidentally all those are perfectly valid subjects for poems if written well).

In every age group there are going to be people who take up writing poetry for all sorts of reasons other than that they love it, and who don’t want to get to grips with what hard work it is. Some will think of it as a hobby, or therapy, or a chance to experience something different - and why shouldn’t they? - but it needn’t be assumed that every woman over forty is in that category.

Writing for me is not and has never been a function of my age or a desperate attempt to fill the void that is my frustrated Middle-Aged existence, but a vocation and something I truthfully couldn’t live without. But you only have to look at me – and certain of my poems - to see I am recognisably an MAW although I’ve been a writer all my life. I’ve been a Young Writer too, with all the support and accolades that come with that title; and I had plenty in of those in my twenties – probably before I deserved them.

Now, after decades of making things out of the written word, I’m much humbler knowing how much I don’t know, but a lot better at what I do (I’ve lived more, yes, and practised more) and I am, surprise surprise, OLDER. Middle Aged, even, and yes, a Woman. And there are apparently TOO MANY of us. Oh God. Let me go and burn all my manuscripts then, and leave the world of poetry to the Young Writers and the Middle Aged Men. Yes, I know, the latter come in for a bit of stick too, but not for being bad poets all writing about the same tiresome things because they’re in need of something to do with their shallow, empty lives now that the kids have left home and the dog’s died.

I would just love us to get away from this obsession with who the poet is, and particularly their age and gender, and focus down on whether the poetry is any good or not. As a reader and purchaser of poetry, I don’t care at all what age a poet is. In fact I’d rather not know. All I care about is that they provide me with a transformative vision of the world that reframes some aspect of it, that gives me some sort of frisson – intellectual or emotional, and that they know how to use words to make a poem.

Labels for people have never been helpful, we all know that, but the MAW is getting quite a reputation for herself as a desperate dilettante (excuse near oxymoron) in the poetry community, and it’s time to knock that one on the head.

Now I must go and play bridge, or is rummy, at a poetry coffee morning, take my happy pills and write a few lines of sad doggerel about my menstrual cycle.

Angry? Moi?