No one was more surprised than Tel Aviv poet Karen Alkalay-Gut, 59, to find her progressive rock album Thin Lips on the shelves last summer.

"The album was compiled almost by accident," she recalls. "Motky [Sherubini], the producer at Pookh records, turned round to me and said, 'I like your voice, let's see what we can do with it.' I laughed and said, 'Yes, Motky, shame I can't sing.'"

With or without a good voice, the impeccably dressed author of 15 collections of English poetry (the newest So Far, So Good comes out this week) went dutifully to the studio one sweaty day in August.

"I felt sick, it was the hottest day of the year and I didn't know what I was doing. I just stood there for an hour, reading my poetry and left."

Six months later, composer and keyboard player Roy Yarkoni came over to her Ramat Aviv apartment with a rough draft of the album. Alkalay-Gut was amazed at the result and she wasn't the only one.

The newly formed Thin Lips group and the album of the same name created waves both locally and internationally. The Uzbekistan progressive rock Web site called it "one of the best works of Israeli progressive - highly complex and intriguing."

In the album, Alkalay-Gut reads her emotive poetry deadpan, beat-poetry style. Nothing is too banal or bizarre for her to sing about. Chocolate. Yom Kippur. Cellphones. Love. Kitchens. Politics. Sex in Yiddish.

The album and the musical project lay low for a few months before Alkalay-Gut gathered the courage to perform together with Yarkoni and musician Ishay Sommer. Then, in February, following a party at which they had sung, Nikmat Hatractor asked them if they wanted to form its warm-up act. "It was pretty frightening," she admits. "We weren't on their adverts, so no one knew who was about to appear. And then I would get up on the stage, this old lady, and start in English [from the album's title song], 'My mother always warned me about thin lips.' But they were willing to accept it. They liked it."

Last week, Thin Lips performed at the Barbie music venue in Jaffa, together with guests Maya Dunitz and poet Roni Somek. Dunitz read from Alkalay-Gut's poetry, switching from Hebrew to English with a ruffle of the hair and a clearing of the throat, and Somek, Alkalay-Gut's good friend, read his own works.

The next day, music forums on Ynet, Tapuz, and Nana couldn't stop gushing about the event.

All this is a far cry from what Alkalay-Gut thought she would be doing when she arrived here in 1972, after a long detour from the British bomb shelter she was born in and a long sojourn in New York.

English speakers were sparse in her group of friends, and so she began to write poetry. "It took the place of meaningful dialogue, and then I discovered I really enjoyed poetry, reading it, writing it." It was habit that never stopped, despite Alkalay-Gut's "day job" as a lecturer in English and American poetry at Tel Aviv University.

"I got a lot of criticism for writing in English. I remember at one reading Natan Yonatan's wife said to me, 'So, you've been here 30 years, why don't you write in Hebrew?' It was a direct attack. People felt something on the lines of Yehudi, daber Ivrit [Jew, speak Hebrew]. There was an ideological feeling that you should make a contribution to the Hebrew culture."

Despite the pressure, Alkalay-Gut has never felt comfortable writing in any other language, and now that she has started to put it to music, people seem less bothered by the English.

"I think it's because it's less literary and academic," she says, thinking it through slowly. "People are used to hearing music in English. They accept it much more readily. Take the evening at the Barbie as an example. I thought people would shout out, 'Ma ze b'Ivrit? [What's it in Hebrew?] but they really didn't." And so Thin Lips fulfills two of Alkalay-Gut's greatest desires: to read poetry in her mother tongue and present it to people in an immediate and enjoyable way.

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