You’ve heard of the IKEA assembly test, but have you heard of the Ruckus poetry test?

Open mic Ruckus at Brisbane’s West End is held on the last Wednesday of every month. It features a wide, never-vetted cast of emerging, established and celebrated poets, and includes the most bizarre lyricism I have ever heard.

I took a guy there on our second date recently as a test of how well he might handle the arts scene. I thought if he could withstand Ruckus, with its absurd prose and passionate poets, it would bode well for our future.

Ruckus is a place everyone should go at least once. It is entirely different to whatever you might expect. At every event, whenever I feel like I know what is about to happen, it changes. The only disclaimer is that there is no disclaimer. Content warnings are encouraged, but nobody knows what any of the 16 presenting poets may do with their allotted three minutes.

Apparently, there has been pissing in cups and naked dancing. Micah Rustichelli, a club kid/nightlife fine arts circus performer, was the midway act in August 2025. It remains one of the strangest things I have ever witnessed. I will never forget it, despite my now-boyfriend and consistent ruckus lovers’ insistence that I should, for how else is anything meant to compete?

Rustichelli was a featured artist. Their participation was known, organised and advertised with complete transparency – which also happened to be the state Rustichelli was in. They wore a clear suit and clown makeup while painting a beautiful picture. The paintbrush was held through a mouth gag, their nose and toes.

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Martin Ingle, one of the original Ruckus Slam organisers, told me: “We wanted to create this space because people were taking poetry too seriously, and we decided to make it silly and open up the microphone, literally.”

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Ruckus has been going for 13 years and deserves recognition for what it achieves. Any serious Brisbane poet keeps their license to perform (which happens to be a colourful plastic dinosaur) with them for life, recognising that they were once a speaker at Ruckus Poetry Slam.

The judging is based on a dinosaur scale, the lowest score a Wolly Slammoth and the highest, at five points, Jurassic Prose. The Jurassic Park theme song is played if all five judges give a Jurassic Prose score to the same poet. At a certain point in the night, you become increasingly aware that the other two poetry parents, Megan Bartholomew and Angela Peita, are teachers and you are actually back in kindergarten – but with adult jokes, swearing and a light (alcoholic) buzz.

Serani, one of the newest members, began attending Youth Ruckus. In 2025, he won the Arts Queensland XYZ Prize for Spoken Word. He believes that this success was due in no small part to Ruckus: “I consume poetry as a language. To me it’s a spoken rather than written form. Ruckus has given me immediate feedback, and I can hear how my words fill a room.”

The walls have heard it all at Mirrorball Ministries, where a disco ball takes up most of the ceiling. Serani believes that part of the power of Ruckus is because “going online isn’t an escape anymore”.

“In the creative industries, we are at the forefront of creating change; we have to be the creative thinkers to assess problems, and Ruckus is inspiring. People come up all the time saying, ‘Thank you so much for giving an opportunity, and reminding me of the earnestness that is the act of doing poetry’.”

While Ruckus may not be highbrow literature, an intentionality exists with the potential to make you feel something deeply.

Ruckus happens on the last Wednesday of every month, and September’s event engaged “deep” topics – from mental health to an Australian identity, to politics, cuts to arts funding, body dysmorphia and the desire for love.

The poetry performers vary in every aspect. An 80-year-old Turrbal elder spoke about Mother Earth. Performer Claudia Hutchinson had Jurassic Prose-level lines about why women will always choose the bear. She spoke about how (to paraphrase) the bear doesn’t sit behind you on the bus and ask for your number/ because you’re just another number/ you don’t have to fill out a report when it attacks you/ people believe you/ and it doesn’t feel entitled to your body when it hunts/ the bear doesn’t tell you that you asked for it.

“There were a few years for me where life got tough,” Hutchison says. “I stopped writing and performing. But even during that silence I knew Ruckus would be waiting for me.”

At the September event, Hutchinson tied for first place (the winner decided by a sudden-death scissors-paper-rock match). She did not progress to the November 25 finals, where each monthly winner will have the chance to win a crowd-funded prize (a hat is passed around accumulating cash – and Go-Cards).

There is always something that will get a “double deep”, screamed from the audience (a moment when a particular piece of prose stays with you). Ruckus is a place for love, not only of art but romance, with three marriage proposals to date. The professional pictures taken of performers often make it to their Tinder profiles. It’s a place where you may find your person or at least test your ability to listen to their laugh, responses and dinosaur noises indefinitely.

Ruckus Poetry Slam, Mirrorball Ministries, 3/126 Boundary St, West End, Brisbane. Its next event is Ruckus Poetry Slam – Spooooooky Edition on October 28, 6.30pm-10.30pm. Instagram: @ruckusslam

humanitix.com/host/ruckus-slam

This article was written as part of The Critical Writing Program, run in partnership with Queensland Writers Centre and InReview Queensland, supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, part of the Department of Education.