Austerity is series of poems documenting the effects of the UK government’s austerity programme. All the poems depict true events that have occurred as a result of austerity.
Austerity is inspired by the work of American poet Charles Reznikoff, in particular two of his works: Testimony and Holocaust.
Charles Reznikoff
Both Testimony and Holocaust are ‘found texts’. A found text is the literary equivalent of a collage, a work composed by taking ‘words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning’ (from Wikipedia).
Testimony
Reznikoff trained as a lawyer, though he never practised. At one time he was employed by a legal encyclopaedia, a job requiring him to work through several thousand court cases dating from the late 19th into the early 20th century.
As he read the legal documents, some of them began condensing into poems; Reznikoff would strip out all the legal proceedings and arguments, the speeches of advocate, prosecutor, judge, leaving only the direct words of the witnesses to the case. Sometimes a document of several thousand words would result in only five or six lines of poetry. The result, Testimony, is a work of several hundred pages, charting the rise of modern industrial society in America.
From Testimony
- All revolving shafts are dangerous
- but a vertical shaft,
- neither boxed nor guarded against,
- most dangerous.
- The girl’s work for the company was changed
- to sweeping the floors:
- among other places the floor of a room
- where the shaft in a passageway –
- between the wall and a machine –
- ran from the floor to the ceiling.
- In sweeping around it one morning
- her apron was caught
- and drawn about the shaft
- and she was whirled around
- striking the wall and machinery.
Holocaust
Holocaust is a much shorter work. This time Reznikoff made use of transcripts from the Nuremberg Trials and the Eichmann Trial as his sources. The result is a brutal, direct depiction of the suffering of Jewish people during the Holocaust.
From Holocaust
- They gathered some twenty Hasidic Jews from their homes,
- in the robes these wear,
- wearing their prayer shawls, too,
- and holding prayer books in their hands.
- They were led up a hill.
- Here they were told to chant their prayers
- and raise their hands for help to God
- and, as they did so,
- the officers poured kerosene under them
- and set it on fire.
The Austerity project
Austerity takes the same approach. It uses found texts – media reports, coroner’s reports, police reports, and so on – to create poems depicting the consequences and effects of the British Conservative government’s programme of austerity.
All the poems are accompanied by a link to their source/s, wherever available – in the event that the source isn’t available online, a full reference is given including date, headline/title and publisher. If the original site no longer appears to host the article, a link will be posted to a copy held on the Internet Archive, if one’s available.
Licence
The poems have been released under a Creative Commons BY-NC licence. All the poems may be copied, distributed, displayed, and performed – including derivative works (such as settings to music or audio recordings) – but for noncommercial purposes only. Any derivative works should be made available under a similar licence. Attribution should be made, most ideally to this website (thisisausterity.uk) but can also be made to me personally, Shaun Gardiner. (You can read a little about me here.)
Contact
If you want to get in touch with me you can do so using the contact form on this site. If you have a suggestion of a story or article that you feel could be brought into the project, you can let me know using the form here. (Not all messages will be responded to – if you expect or require a response, indicate this in your message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.)