The importance of further developing the revived language makes poetry important in this land.  And I learned a lot about Hebrew in the taste of the poetry festival in Metula.  Some of the critics – like Ariel Hirschfeld and Dan Miron – help to actually create literature.  But I really think the literature institutions have become more and more insular and need more dialogues with the world.  Ronny Somekh gave me an issue of a Polish journal today that has a poem of his translated into Polish from my English translation, and I flipped through it, wishing we could understand the poems and wondering what they could learn from Hebrew.  It is only chance that Ronny was translated by me, and chance that he has connections in Polish – but there is so much to learn from each other.  Unfortunately, poetry, like everything else, is determined by politics and the people I know who are in charge of the literary world, who determine publication and funding, can’t  handle it.