Subhankar Das

Subhankar Das is a poet of late eighties. His first book of poems ‘Songs of the damaged brain’ was published in 1987. Till date he has published 14 books. Subhankar has been a literary activist at the epicenter of the underground movement in Bangla literature. The otherness of his works has provided new directions to alternative Bangla poetry.

Subhankar’s style departs from the conventional wisdom of poetry and anti-poetry. All such margins are being challenged and the reader is finally led to the magic stairs of ‘open text’.

Method and madness interplays brilliantly. Screams and silences are juxtaposed. The spirit of the Beat generation and the counter culture movement of the west have inspired this poet. An avid reader of William Burroughs, he used cut-ups in his earlier works but later drifted to an indigenous approach. Subhankar uses classic construction patterns embedded in contemporary oral street language – a postmodern attitude which earmarks his poetry. The transient imageries which develop and dissolve disturb what John Burger calls our ways of seeing. The paradigm shift is visible in a phrase like ‘burning in the rain’. How wonderfully he has explored the negative space of language by interchanging the figure-ground relationship.

From his first book ‘Songs of the damaged brain’ to the latest ‘That boy that toy’, Subhankar the poet has traveled long. ‘For Lucy once again and for all radio stations’ was a poem about love, one of the finest ever written in Bangla. ‘From the bunker of this life’, where even death is commoditized reflects the claustrophobia of today’s generation. Beat poet George Dowden called it ‘An Indian Howl’.

In his later works like ‘Charas Jazz’ which was written under the influence of the said drug and in the very long poem called ‘Bubbles of loneliness, solitary propulsion of comfort’ Subhankar has explored the scope of ‘automatic writing’. In his book ‘Luciana Lucia Lucia’ Subhankar plays the role of Text-Jockey and he creates Remix versions of his own poems, something unprecedented in world literature.

Subhankar is a poet with intense passion. This passion remains the vital force within his utterances, the deep musicality of all his works.His new chap book of poetry 'The Streets, The Bubbles Of Grass' is now available from Graffiti Kolkata.

Subhankar has translated works of Allen Ginsberg, Mallarme and other poets. He is the founder of Graffiti Publications which is dedicated to highlight the works of underground writers and artists.