Brisbane Is Lit: A Review of Urinal Mag and Beck Poems
"I am just like the ass,
Braying wildly,
At the vast and glittering sky…"
~ Odelay, Beck Poems
Brisbane is lit, it's true. Brisbane's quietly thriving creative scene has produced some of the country's best art, music and writing. Here are two of the latest literary offerings to come out of Queensland's capital.
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Urinal Mag, edited by Jordan De Visser, offers a selection of fiction and poetry by Brisbane writers - and probably has one of my favourite covers, illustrated by Tahlia Kristjansson. Many of the pieces are irreverent, raw, colloquial and funny: a man in a shopping centre eats a lemon whole; a couple break up at the New Farm markets; twenty thousand bats drop dead in an unseasonal heatwave.
This is the premise of Gabriel Robertson's "Bat Drop Dead" a visceral and unsettling poem in two parts; the first a prose poem where experts warn "not to help the bats lest they mistake you for the one who did this to them" and the second an incantatory chant:
"burnt
road
black
death
temp rise like debt
mid-september
heatwave
coal burn don't fret"
This piece, and others, have elements of the suburban gothic: they are haunted by the intertwined legacies of colonialism and climate change. In Svetlana Sterlin's "Fruitless Farmland," the refrain "this land is not our own," punctuates the poem: with its rich, overabundant imagery and truncated sentences, the piece slowly begins to fill you with a sense of alienation and dread.
The body (and bodily fluids) are recurring themes. Cannibalism shows up twice, in Oliver Rose Brown's deliciously creepy "A Recipe for Bolognaise" and again in Josh Wildie's hilarious "The Adam Incident." One of my favourite pieces was Paul Shields' "Run It Straight," a dialogue between a son visiting his dying father in the hospital. Between the blips and bleeps of the hospital equipment, they each pick players for their fantasy football team, including the likes of the Dalai Lama, the blue wiggle Jeff, Ghostbusters, Jack Kerouac's On The Road and Joseph Stalin's favourite cocktail, the bull shot (if you want to know, it's seven parts beef stock, three parts vodka). It is poignant and funny, and sticks with you long after reading - much like the whole collection.
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Next up is the first book from indie press Psychic Dairy, a collection of poems in three parts titled Beck Poems. No, the musician Beck Hansen did not write them - rather, the twenty-three poems in the collection are a collaborative effort by five poets. The book is an homage to Beck, the alternative folk-hop artist with a cult following who rose to fame in the 1990s. Borrowing their titles from his songs and albums, the poems take his life, career, songs and characters as their inspiration. If you're a Beck fan, strap in for some heady nostalgia; if you're not, this is still an accessible collection that will make you want to know more.
While Beck is known for his weird, witty lyrics and musical experimentation, the poems are more traditional, often with standard rhyme schemes and straightforward imagery and storytelling. I felt that the best pieces were in Part II, with their feverish evocation of the desert and transient communities, strong characters and telling details which brought the scenes to life.
From "Odelay:"
"A drink fridge beaded with condensation,
Blinking red lights spell out OPEN
Between a windowpane and a curtain,
A metal sign advertising painted nails,
Lustre long stripped by the elements…"
And "Lonesome Tears:"
“The yolks are pale and each night another
chicken
Is picked off by the desert foxes.
The sun strains up the sky and from its
zenith
Forces the riven pavements a little further
apart.”
The short and funky "Midnite Vultures" also stands out as embodying the weirdness, experimentalism and humour of Beck's music, with zippy little stanzas like this:
“Life, decay, matter
+PRESSURE+
~HEAT~
...time...
\\\\\\//////”
The collection opens with a "Prologue," which describes Beck's grandfather pushing a piano from the fifth storey of a bombed-out building in 1946. This man was Al Hansen, a pioneer of the experimental art group Fluxus. Beck says his grandfather was "taking trash and making it art," and he aims to do this with his own music. Psychic Dairy continues in this tradition: "Beck Poems weaves a new poetic language from the detritus of its age: pop music and the passions it provokes."
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So, what are you waiting for? Dive into the detritus of our age, support small press and grab a copy of these books today. It’s like a little piece of Brisbane on your bookshelf.
Emily Riches is a writer and editor from Mullumbimby, currently living on Gadigal land (Sydney). She founded Aniko Press to bring passionate writers and curious readers together, discover new voices and create a space for creative community. You can say hi at emily@anikopress.com.