Abstract
Karen Alkalay-Gut is an award-winning poet and professor at Tel Aviv University in Israel. She starts the interview by reading her poems “Plea for a Moratorium on Poems About Jerusalem” and “Belly Dancing, Tel Aviv, March 2002.” She goes on to discuss how poets such as Theodore Roethke and Yehuda Amichai, as well as the influence of music and the feminist movement, have inspired her own poetry. Throughout the interview, she describes how poetry should be a response to our rapidly transitioning lives as well as be able to connect different types of people. She concludes the interview by reading her poem “a poem” from her book Mechitza.
