Meme understanding goes beyond recognizing visual content or literal text; it requires implicit cultural knowledge and pragmatic inference that most vision-language models still lack. We introduce MemeCULT-1K, a multilingual benchmark of 1,000 South Asian memes in Bengali, English, and Hindi, where each meme is paired with a cultural context note and three human-written explanations, along with a supplementary set of 54 Bengali regional dialect memes. We evaluate thirteen popular Vision Language Models (VLMs) under two settings: meme-only and context-aware. Providing minimal cultural context yields consistent gains across all models and languages: mean SBERT similarity improves from 44.6 to 56.4 (+11.8), BLEURT from 37.3 to 42.3 (+5.0), and LLM-as-a-Judge scores from 2.57 to 3.43 out of 5 (+0.86). Fine-grained error analysis reveals that closed-source models fail mainly on entity and reference misidentification, while open-source models are bottlenecked by broader cultural knowledge gaps, with linguistic and phonological failures proving the most context-resistant across both. These results highlight the difficulty of culturally grounded meme understanding and motivate future work on explicit cultural knowledge integration. Our dataset and code are publicly available at TawsifDipto17/MemeCULT-1K.

Poetry generation in low-resource languages such as Bangla is particularly challenging due to the scarcity of structured poetic corpora and the complexity of its metrical system (matra). We present a structure-aware framework for Bangla poetry generation using pretrained Bangla large language models (LLMs)–TigerLLM, TituLLM, and BanglaT5–trained on general non-poetic text corpora augmented with rich structural control tokens. These tokens capture rhyme, meter, word count, and line boundaries, enabling unsupervised modeling of poetic form without curated poetry datasets. Unlike prior fixed-pattern approaches, our framework introduces variable control compositions, allowing models to generate flexible poetic structures. Experiments show that explicit structural conditioning improves rhyme consistency and metrical balance while maintaining semantic coherence. Our study provides the first systematic evaluation of Bangla LLMs for form-constrained creative generation, offering insights into structural representation in low-resource poetic modeling.