Intermedial aesthetics and ontological paradox in debasish lahiri’s poetry

Highly appreciated for his” sumptuous and inventive language” (James Sutherland Smith), poet, critic and translator Debasish Lahiri from Lal Baba College, affiliated to the University of Calcutta, is the new type of international writer who builds bridges among cultures fusing traditions and inviting comparative readings, in the spirit of the new world literature theorized by David Damrosch or Homi Bhabha, who claim that no national literature evolves in isolation from the others. It is not the non-places of transnational space that stirred the ekphrastic imagination of poet Debasish Lahiri, however, but cultural landmarks from various parts of the world remediated in the manner of multimedial aesthetics and through generic experimentation. The ontogenesis of each poem resides in the actualization of a virtual structure of meaning lurking in the art object, the self-representation, in dramatic monologue, of a character in a picture, etc. Unlike traditional ekphrasis, Lahiri’s poems in A Certain Penance of Light (Red River, 2025) break frontiers between the realms of physicality, subjectivity and the order of artifacts, creating a space of perpetual emergence of the contemplated objects into new possibilities of revelatory interpretation and reinscription.