Vale: Rudi Krausmann

Rudi Krausmann, photo courtesy of John Tranter.

Rochford Street Review was saddened to hear of the death, on 15 March 2019, of Rudi Krausmann.  A great poet and publisher, his journal, Aspect: Art and Literature, was one of the great revelations to a young poet during the early 1980s. Another great personal influence was his 1977 publication (as editor) Recent German Poetry, which introduced me to a world of poetry outside of England and the USA.

– Mark Roberts

The following tribute is taken from The Australian Poetry website

Rudi Krausmann was born in Mauerkirchen, Austria, in 1933. After studying Economics in Vienna, he worked as a journalist for the Austrian newspaper, Salzburger Nachrichten. Following his arrival in Australia in 1958 he worked as a freelance writer and editor, a part-time tutor at the University of New South Wales, a language teacher in Sydney and Melbourne and a broadcaster on Radio 2EA. In 1975 he founded Aspect: Art and Literature, which aimed to interrelate literature and the visual arts, and which he edited until it ceased publication in 1989. He was Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1980.

Krausmann published several collections of poems, mostly with small presses. In keeping with his desire to interrelate literature and the visual arts, some of them include illustrations by artists such as Brett Whitely and Garry Shead, while others were published in both German and English. As one might expect given his background, one of Krausmann’s main preoccupations was displacement and exile. He published concrete and prose poems but mainly favoured free verse.

A large selection of Rudi’s poetry can be found at https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/krausmann-rudi

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