Poetry of the Middle East

Agi Mishol: The work you are doing with Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish and Yehuda Amichai sounds appealing and vital. Amichai was a close friend and I've been fortunate to be the first poet awarded the prize now given in his name. I read poetry at a joint appearance with Darwish in Berlin and rode with him to the airport in a taxi. He talked about the difficulty of being a national poet and on his longing for poetic freedom. Adonis I met in Italy; all efforts to bring him to Israel have been met with polite refusals, I'm sorry to say.

It's hard for me to recommend poets in a forum such as this but many good poets may be found through the Israeli pages of the [Rotterdam] Poetry International Web, and I am sure you will find some to your taste. One excellent Israeli poet is [the late] Dahlia Ravikovitch.

Ghassan Zaqtan: There is a long list of Palestinian poets, starting with the great poet Mahmoud Darwish and of course there are also other Israeli poets whom I stated above.