The architecture of a poem is very important to me — partly because of my own inherent interest in architecture itself. During my days of apprenticeship, I consciously wrote using traditional strict forms, formal metre and rhyme schemes. Of course, I have also written in free verse, but due to my penchant for formal verse you are likely to encounter a pantoum next to an acrostic poem, a triolet juxtaposed against a ghazal, lyric narratives and prose poetry, Sapphic fragments, mosaic pastiché, ekphrastic verse, sonnet, rubai, poem songs, prayer chants, documentary feeds, rap, reggae, creole, canzone, tritina, sestina, ottava rima, rime royale and variations on waka: haiku, tanka, katauta, choka, bussokusekika, sedoka.

As I became more experienced and skilled, I started innovating and experimenting, creating and inventing new forms and poetic structures. I also believe that a poem should not only be linguistically challenging, but how it appears visually is an important factor as well. For me, typography and structure of a poem are just as vital as the inner spirit and content of any poem.

If I have to locate myself geographically or culturally — then I would say I am a Bengali poet who writes in English. My relationship with Bengali is umbilical and neonatal. My parents were Bengali, and I grew up in a home speaking Bangla in a Bengali neighbourhood in New Delhi. Hindi and English were my other mother tongues. So the cultural, historical, linguistic and literary tradition of the Bengali tongue has had a very important effect of my poetic cadence, texture, rhythm and early rhyme-constructions. One very good example is my poem, ‘Durga Puja’ [re-published later in The Dhaka Tribune newspaper as part of a larger sequence, ‘Durga Sextet’]: 

During the lead-up to the puja celebrations, prayers are chanedt from Chandipaath. In the poem, ‘Durga Puja’, I try to replicate its languorous baritone rhythm and its song-like cadence, as well as its long-lined couplet-structure.

In the poem ‘New York Times,’ I invented a rhyme-scheme — abxba cdxdc efxfe ... and so on ... — the middle line, i.e., the third ‘x’ line, in fact is the mirror-line which reflects the first and second lines with the fourth and fifth lines of each stanza. The other reason I used the five-line stanza-format in the poem is because the city of New York itself has five boroughs: Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, etc. The other aspect about this poem is if you turn the poem 90 degrees on its central axis, then a different kind of mirrorline mimics the shape of the island of Manhattan itself and its reflection on the surrounding waters. 

Another poem, a book-length sequence, Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames (subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio as a verse-play, and premiered in London as a stage-play by Border Crossings directed by Michael Walling) is based on a series of eight etchings of a British artist, Peter Standen. The entire poem is set in rhymed couplets, reflecting the presence of two principal characters — man/woman, lover/other, life/death, and the other essential dualities. But they do not appear as obvious rhymes (like the translucent choral refrains in the poem) — they are wrap-around rhymes as opposed to endstopped rhymes. The four stanzas in each section reflect the four seasons, the four sides of a frame, the four corners of a visual space. I also use alternating line-indentation for each couplet and stanza with the idea that the entire poem works on a cyclical principle. So, if you join all the stanzas together using the left-justified margin as a reference plane, they in fact fit in a perfect dove-tail joint.

The poem ‘Single Malt’ (published in Wasafiri, UK) is one grammatical line, without any full-stops, mimicking the way whiskey, when poured gently into a crystal glass, caresses its sides and subsequently the tongue’s palette. Therefore the slim verticality of this poem’s structure:

Another example is the poem, ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’ (published on ‘The Poetry Foundation’, USA): In this poem, it might be interesting for readers keen on  form to note that the line-end rhyme-scheme — abacca ... dbdeed ... fbfggf ... — maps and mirrors the actual classical dance step pattern and beat — ta dhin ta thaye thaye ta. Also, the left hand margin indentations match the same scheme and form. 

There is also my book-length poem, Distracted Geography: An Archipelago of Intent (published by Peepal Tree (UK) & Wings Press (USA): It’s one long poem over 206 pages. The sparse elongated structure of the poem partly reflects the strength and surety of the human vertebra and spine, much like Neruda’s Odes that reflects the long, thin shape of Chile. The sections and subsections join together like synapses between bone and bone. The titles are translucent markers or breath pauses, not separators. The short two-line couplets echo the two-step footprints, a pathway mapped on the atlas. The 12 sections correspond to the 12 bones in a human ribcage, the 12 months in a year, the two 12-hour cycles in a day. There are 26 bones in the human vertebrae,and the 26 parts in the poem slowly assemble themselves and form a montage of tenuously strung lyrics. The 206 pages in this book match the exact number of bones in a human body.

I am constantly innovating with form and structure. This has allowed me to invent and introduce new forms (and structure) to the English poetry tradition, ones that did not exist before. Even as the voice and technique are in a constant state of flux and growth, there is always a distinct personal signature. 

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