Ben Maier was born in London in 1987. He studied English Literature at Durham University, before completing a Masters in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University Belfast. His work is published in The Salt Book of Younger Poets and Irish Pages. He currently lives in Belfast, where he is studying for a PhD […]
after Baudelaire Nature is a circus tent – its bones, two tall masts which commune in whispers of canvas and metal – and man is a clown passing before conspirators who watch keenly all the old familiar tricks. Look up: just as the acrobat’s bright weaves of ribbon furl, unfurl from a knot tied fast […]
“Goodnight room. Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon. Goodnight light, and the red balloon…” Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown There are no songs now. There are no classes. Only locked doors, up-ended chairs, a slow dance of hanging mobiles. The Fire Exit man perpetually flees the scene of a green crime, never making […]
Chapter 1 of A Short History of Textiles is devoted to the qualities of large-scale commissions in cotton. A cursory glance is given to hospital sheets which once began life as great swathes, not King- but Continent-sized, over which sharpened iron grids were laid to cut away the standard shape: large enough for the average […]
In a clearing, against a fallen trunk stippled with orange fungus, we threw ourselves down and gradually got back our breaths until, with a regular heartbeat, I could hear the wind in the trees and, scared of silence, started to talk about the kind of day I’d had, its bobbing tide of alarm clocks and […]
they say that in winter, the pines start to glow. I couldn’t say because I’ve never been but I heard it just now on the radio. The hail hits like pennies in downtown Tokyo. They watch the whole thing on an LCD screen and before the hail falls, the pixels start to glow. In England […]
Ben Maier talks about the genesis of his poem In Idaho, North Carolina, and Maine.”
Ben Maier talks about how he first became interested in writing poetry.