Mark Bennington
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…
These are the opening lines of the poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg, which is said to have turned America from the 1950s into the 1960s overnight. When I first read it, it completely moved me.
Poetry is something that we innately understand, if not intellectually then viscerally, through its figurative imagery of language. When I was four year old, I told my father while driving to school, “When I grow up I want to be an artist.” I think in retrospect what I meant by that was “I need to express myself as an individual in the world.”
We are all artists at heart, we all want to express ourselves in a larger way… be it through various accomplishments in school, sports, arts, service or raising children, or anything that expresses our essence and shows the world that we were here. The artiste’s mind, like the beginner’s mind, creates and activates a rich basis of community where we can truly express our individuality.
Ginsberg said: Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
He is one to be read, witnessed and honoured.
Mark Bennington is a well-known international
photographer
As told to Nidhi Sethi