Keith Gottschalk is a South African poet, known for his anti-apartheid poetry. He was born on the 14 March 1946 in Cape Town, where he still lives. He studied at the University of Cape Town

University of Cape Town

The University of Cape Town is a public research university located in Cape Town in the Western Cape province of South Africa. UCT was founded in 1829 as the South African College, and is the oldest university in South Africa and the second oldest extant university in Africa.-History:The roots of...

 1964-70, where he was a tutor and junior lecturer to 1983.
Keith Gottschalk works in the Political Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape

University of the Western Cape

The University of the Western Cape is a public university located in the Bellville suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. It was established in 1960 by the South African government as a university for Coloured people only...

.

Keith Gottschalk's poetry is 'political', and its appearance at cultural festival and mass rallies of the mass democratic movement attests to its massive success as political poetry. He is a performing poet, whose work needs to be heard as well as read.

He has given over one hundred performances of his poems, and also had over one hundred poems published in magazines such as New Coin, New Contrast, Phoebe, Staffrider

Staffrider

Staffrider was a South African literary magazine.Staffrider was first published in 1977, and took its name from slang for people hanging outside or on the roof of overcrowded, racially segregated trains....

 and Agenda. His first collection was "Emergency Poems"
In his introduction to "Emergency Poems" Peter Horn described Gottschalk's contribution as follows: "wit and conceit also seem to me to describe most adequately the poetic and aesthetic vehicles which Gottschalk chooses to address the political in poetry. Often, when critics address poetry like Gottschalk's they use the term satire, this most misplaced and displaced genre in English poetry. What is central to satire and to wit is not, as popular misconception may have it, its comic quality, the funniness, but the sudden flashlike insight into the incongruous, as Freud has clearly shown in his study on the Witz." He was praised for his poems' "tight control and their strategy of irony." His modernisation of the traditional African praise poem "shows their continued existence and meaning for large portions of the population."

He is now drafting a cycle of astronomy and spaceflight poems. http://www.astronautix.com/poems/index.htm

Sources

• See also: Literature of South Africa
  Literature of South Africa
  South African literature is the literature of South Africa which has 11 national languages, Afrikaans, English, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Pedi, Tswana, Venda, SiSwati, Tsonga, and Ndebele.-Overview:...