SHOUT and Daily Star Books jointly organise the Slam Poetry Nights once every month to offer a platform for conversations on art, personal freedom, and the issues urgent to the country’s people, all through the lens of poetry. 

The December session arrives on Friday, December 2, at the Gulshan Paara Utshab at 3:00-3:45 PM.

Thoughts of a devoted poet

She came out from the cocoon of the accepted designated roles of women and marched forward to live an extraordinary life. 

What moon might mean to you

Daffodils and forget-me-nots smile under the Autumn Sun.

Oh, I’m waltzing down.

But like him they will remember her complexion and her curls and the countless pieces that she graced.

A poem about the Fall.

Eight mighty titans, unleashing their wrath!

A series of poems also reflect his ecological sensitivity to the machine in the garden and snakes and hyenas imperiling forests and rivers and Dhaka—the city he has lived in for most of his life.

Nineteen performers recited poems in Bangla and English, their topics ranging from nostalgia, personal growth and daydreams to mental health, death, and trauma.

Protiti’s poems are mostly ‘bare’ conversational musings exploring ‘selfhood, separation, exile, love and longing’.

A fine good morning poem

A late summer in June,

Morning sun, and its endearing ardor swathes my spent body, I awake a ghost.

The poems ranged from mental health issues to individual freedom of expression and every musing in between.

The evening of September 8 at The Daily Star Centre saw an outpouring of verses to a live and very interactive audience. Daily Star Books and SHOUT jointly launched our series of Slam Poetry Nights—an evening, every month, of verses recited in the spirit of creative freedom.

The aim of a dohakar has always been to open the eyes of the masses. Many of the dohas written by the two prominent dohakars, Soroho-Pa and Kabir Das, have modernist, anti-establishment themes, criticising the social, political and religious conventions of their times. 

He had lost touch almost completely with his craft, so much so that he wondered if he even had it in him. But even so, for the sake of writing, he wrote. When the pandemic hit, Helal batted off the dust of his desk and sat down to write. Sitting from a foreign land, the ink flowed again.