Mary Burger - a brilliant intervention on the aftereffects of teleological thinking. This work summons the complexities and conundrums that are lodged like holograms in our philosophical archives. Mirror motifs: logics of systems wrestle/systems of logics wrestle to question our hardwired metaphors for existence

Mary Burger, Then Go On, Litmus Press, 2012.



The formal inventiveness of Mary Burger’s writing in part derives from her questioning of received ideas but also from the sheer pleasure she seems to take in following what the sentence can do within the “as-yet as-ever still-undetermined space between send and receive.” The attempt in these poems-in-prose, which are also essays or essay-like poetic inventions, is critical (as in critique and crucial): to make more real what is covered over and abstracted, not by simplifying but activating the thinking writer’s experience of those cultural, philosophical, scientific, and social logics that imagine their target audiences (“us”) to be objects merely of affirmation and compliance. —Carla Harryman



The mind at work in Mary Burger’s Then Go On is by turns exacting, passionate, tuned in to matters of scale as well as the functional paradox (“It is possible she was one of those who could steer the correct course only when she believed navigation was impossible”), and wholly unremitting in its drive to “verify the veracity of perception.” These qualities are made active through the precision and clarity of Burger’s sentences, which are always situated in the present, and which can cut through one’s given layers of belief with an oddly deliberate (sensitive) quickness. No other writing I know right now has such unadorned focus. Reading Then Go On has me reconsidering my notions of what certain surfaces – that of a person, a social identity, a piece of writing – can be. —Anselm Berrigan



Then Go On is a brilliant intervention on the aftereffects of teleological thinking. This work summons the complexities and conundrums that are lodged like holograms in our philosophical archives. Mirror motifs: logics of systems wrestle/systems of logics wrestle to question our hardwired metaphors for existence. Burger undoes (our cultural motives for) thingness with a series of affective lingual stunts. This book takes the reader into thinking post-human as she translates thought currents under and below meaning. Burger traces the social along neural pathways of cognition in edgy, provocative writing. —Brenda Iijima



 The avant-garde style of Mary Burger’s writing arrives as a contemplation of the space between sending and receiving. The prose poems, or essay-like poetic explorations demonstrate a close attention to reality. The voice that guides the text is one of ebb and flow towards the cultural, philosophical, and social realities of modernity. In the poem “Orbital,” “A certain comfort with motion, at any scale, lets you shift between here, in this kitchen, and here, in this coastal weather pattern, and here, in this planetary orbital path, and here, in this unfurling galaxy.” The poem unfolds upon itself in moments like these, as if to illustrate that multiplicity is indicative of the human condition. To exist one must occupy numerous places all within the confines of the present moment. Writing towards the continuous epiphany of what it means to be fully alive, “The Current” shows Burger writing of that liveliness as “And our existence here due to the act that there are those willing to work for the only-imaginable.” The implication is that the dreamy state of one human being’s imagination leads to a sense of progress for society. Of the hope for humanity, the prose poem continues with “This paradigm shifts so that words are as nimble as neurotransmitters. Like a small chemical messenger, a word can do anything you can think of. A word can move muscles. A word can hold eyes.” Just like speech, the poetic prose located on the space of white pages bound in book form help to awaken the reader. Returning to that sense of ebb and flow, the reader is asked to think towards “A risk. To risk a little every day. To make sure you want it still. Invite opponents to attack. Risk gravity, velocity, impact, mass. Some can’t live without challenge. Some can’t ask.” As if to pull on the glorious idea of what it means to be fully able to create a once wild and precious life, the intention seems to be one of igniting a passion for luminous elements: speech, movement, art, nature, and even the seemingly ordinary right to dream. - Melissa Barrett-Traister



I’ve read this book of 20 short pieces a few times and still don’t understand half of it but I keep going back to let it re-code certain parts of my mind, sharpen the many dulled edges. These prose poems are essay-like and engineered to call into question our understanding of how we develop and maintain a sense of what we know. - Matthew Jakubowski




excerpt:

Necessary

It became necessary then to stop entirely, or to go on in a different way.
I discarded a language behind the language that was more present and less conflicted.
This language materialized, or coalesced I suppose, as if a fog had been there all along but gradually became opaque so that the air that I had seen through became instead the thing that I could see.
That knowledge be something that could be used to affect our material conditions was a premise I was forced to reconsider.
How really impossibly wrong our interpretations of others’ behaviors are all of the time. I didn’t want my conversations to be limited to those with an interest in language.
The sideways hustle that brought me here, this place can’t be reached any other way and yet it is imperative to get here, unforeseeable though it is. This place coalesces out of the accidents and refusals of the places we try concertedly to be. This place, though indispensable, could just as easily have been missed.
The reference points keep changing but the desires seem to remain the same: to be in a room with others. To have one’s shape taken up by the others and enlarged beyond what one thought possible. This is something we can do for one another. The unforeseeable outcomes of various combinations can improve conditions beyond any expectations. This decision seemed to attract the longed- for companions.
Everything we could think of, we put in a photograph and delivered to the rest of the world. It wasn’t the same as if you were there; what we could think of became shaped by the form of a photograph being delivered to the many people we had never seen. We began to think in the form of the photograph.
We enjoyed those times so, it was as if we were looking back on a fond memory. We treated the present like something that had already happened.
I am becoming something I can’t name; therefore I exceeds this thing. This excess amounts to the nature of mind, that wants to be elsewhere.
In retrospect, a pattern emerged, but only just; one could not say it had been premeditated.
And it went on like this, with the occurrence of an occasional phrase, an insect buzzing past the ear.
© Litmus Press. All rights reserved.

His Wrist

His wrist was not like me.  His wrist was part of him and where he went his wrist went with him.  I could know his wrist but not the way he did.  I had attachment to his wrist.  His wrist was like a movie.  Like a movie I could touch.  Between my thumb and fingers.  His wrist was not transparent, it wasn’t like a movie that way.  It reflected light.  It moved in space and time, it was a movie that way.  When the space and time in which I saw his wrist was gone, his wrist was gone.  That’s the way it was a movie.  It existed when I looked at it.  When I couldn’t see it it was memory.  An image in my mind.  Just like a movie.

A wrist that didn’t know it was.  What does a wrist know?  He knew that he had one, he knew that he had two.  If they were missing he’d be gone.  His wrists would never leave without him.

  

I Like Purple

                                                            for Iris Vitiello, age almost 6

“I like purple,” she says.  “I don’t know why.”

She tapes plastic farm animals to a piece of cardboard and calls it a farm.  She has colored the cardboard green.  We accept her premise.

It wasn’t so hard to understand what we’d done—

create a work in which “being” was always in question—

but the existence of the work defied understanding.

A study on narrative positivism—the novel represents public and private space, violence represents subconscious urges—cannot account for it.

Walk me through the body.

That everything be a playlet—the accordion-playing rabbit, the finely detailed plastic hippo (“West Germany”), the fish vase with the round eye hole and the open mouth, the Indonesian shadow puppet, all enact a drama on the dining room table—and we keep going, as if we knew their parts and could play them.

The truth came out:  I did not know how to read.

An ego gets formed, and a vocabulary, which may at first seem easy, even trite, may seem to determine specific ideas, may seem to prevent the transformation of an embroidered peasant shawl into a wriggling hallucination—girls lined up, one row above another, as if in the corridors of a cell block, a bar or scarf floating across their middle, and below the heads of the next row, the bars moved and danced with the girls, and it seemed the whole system might split, but it didn’t.

 

Notes From the Ground

Essay reprinted from A Partial Handbook for Navigators, writings about natural and

constructed space.

Published by Interbirth Books, 2008.

It’s nothing like being dead.

I made an early-morning trip to lie in a shallow grave and watch the Golden Gate Bridge emerging from the fog.  Karl and his friends placed shovels of dirt on me.   He said tell him if it got hard to breathe.

It was workaday city dirt, gray, clumpy, littered with human detritus.   No fragrant humus, no romance of fertility and renewal.

Karl and the rest drifted away to leave me alone with my interment.  The weight of the soil pressed lightly, my head lolled on its earth pillow.  I was immobilized, more by my complicity than by the weight itself.   My hands at my sides, I was released from activity.

At grass-eye level, I flipped quickly through Horton hearing a Who, Gulliver stumbling over Lilliput.  There were small things walking around down there.  My point of view on the ground plane made knee-jerk reactions irrelevant.  I stared at the Golden Gate, impressed by my private audience.  A pelican flew low overhead, its usually-inaudible wing beats amplified.  The perimeter revolved with joggers, dog walkers, early strollers.  What would I tell them if any asked why I was lying here at seven in the morning, with only my head above ground?

I went into the earth to find out if it was any different there.

I went looking for some recognition on the earth’s part, or my part, that we were together.

I find cemeteries especially interesting because they represent both the beginning and the end of landscape and architecture.  Architectural historians are in common agreement that the tomb represents the very first attempt to create enduring built structures.

—Ken Warpole

This structure was not a tomb and not enduring, not really a structure.  Park caretakers would restore the sod after we left.

In early Europe and America, the dead were placed in small churchyards in bustling town centers, with austere slab headstones and no greenery to distract from the somber business of mourning.  By the nineteenth century, the rise of Enlightenment secularism combined with a new public aversion to living near corpses and a growing romanticist taste for picturesque landscapes.  A modern hybrid emerged: the rural cemetery.  In these park-like settings, graves were arranged beneath groves of trees, and the leafy paths and vistas were designed as much for the pleasures of the living as for the remembrance of the dead.  Families might take an excursion to the edge of the city, pay their respects to a forbear, and enjoy a picnic under the elms.  The first of these destination cemeteries, Pere-lachaise, opened on the edge of Paris in 1803.   Variations arose across the United States, from Mount Auburn near Cambridge to Mountain View in the Oakland hills.  These early memorial/recreational sites organized the emotions in rambling but decorous arrays.  White marble monuments in ancient Greek, Roman, or Egyptian style perched among landscapes designed for poetic, transcendental contemplation.  As years went on, plantings became more ornamental, and the cemeteries came to resemble arboreta.

But within a century, it seems, the miniature cities of monuments and carefully framed views had become too sumptuous to encompass contemporary understandings of mortality, or of land use.  Twentieth-century cemeteries began to emphasize utility and regularity, with little investment in design.  Yet one among them stands out.

The Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm, begun in 1915, restored the use of simple slab headstones but scattered them among deep forest, with broad grassy slopes beyond.  It was as if the churchyard cemetery were sprung from its pen and released into the countryside.  The interspersing of natural landforms and modest stone markers evokes layered responses; here, we who’ve been born in the past hundred years or so can recognize some of the complexity of our mortal predicament.  Swedish landscape architect Thorbjörn Andersson describes the effect as “feelings of landscapes of many different sorts, such as hope and happiness, sorrow and despair, death and resurrection. It is an environment full of feelings that facilitate contact between the inner and outer landscapes.”

Part disappearing act, part self-amplification.

My moment was nothing like death.

Rod’s father died the day before.  It wasn’t unexpected.  It wasn’t tragic.  It was an end of a definite kind.  He met me at Crissy Field after my voluntary interment to take a walk before he flew east for the funeral.

Everything is not a metaphor for everything.

It was nothing like being dead, but the comparison with a gravesite was inevitable.  If this were to be my grave some day—this over-famous site that had been my youthful pilgrimage, the place where I became most alive—I would not live to regret it.

 

 Notes:

Andersson, Thorbjörn.  Quoted in Ken Warpole, “Stockhom Woodland Cemetery.”  WWW.Opendemocracy.net.

Chappell, Jim.  The Magic of Landscape.   WWW.Spur.org/jimchappell.

Rogers, Elizabeth Barlow.  Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History.  New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001.

Spirn, Anne Whiston.  The Language of Landscape.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Warpole, Ken.  “Stockhom Woodland Cemetery.”  WWW.Opendemocracy.net/

ecology-landscape/article_840.jsp.

 

Excerpt from Sonny

Lyric novella on the Manhattan Project and a rural American family

Published by Leon Works Press, 2005

This boy raised rabbits and kept them in cardboard pens in the yard.

He showed the rabbits at the fair. He sold the rabbits for pets, or for fur, or for food.

———————————

Once when it snowed very hard the boy had to climb on the roof of the house and push the snow off with a broom.

His sisters looked out through the glass front door.

———————————

What this boy liked best about representation was the way it consoled him for being alive.

What this boy liked best about being alive was the way it consoled him for the immateriality of representation.

———————————

But this was something new—

something out of all proportion—

Once it was dangerous to know that you were not the center. Then the knowledge put us at the center once again. What other creature knew the world that way? We outlasted our own credibility.

We broke our world apart and started over, broke it and rebuilt it in a different form. Now we were teaching nature to remake itself. An abstract version of a civic form. If there was no creation or destruction, what we valued was what we used to build the form.

We looked for one event that would begin or end, a single mark that everything was organized around.

The climax turning unextraordinary when it repeats. So the haze of arousal, undistinguished, punctuated repeatedly

blue, gray, orange.

It was the moment of implosion that we lived for but the aftermath that made it interesting.

———————————

They mean so many things when they say “brother.” Almost always they mean more than a picture on the wall.

This one was natural, made with an element in nature.

———————————

Because it isn’t possible to explain what we did in terms of knowing, if we didn’t know but thought we did, believing that we did,

in order to do anything it’s necessary to separate one thing from the others, one thread pulled through the air, to understand is different from the thought,

the rabbit freezes, twitches, cocks its ears, eyes blinking—

to act is different from the understanding of the act—

the rabbit tenses, springs, and disappears,

the act is over and the thought remains—

bouncing across the field and vanishing,

we fell back on the only thing we knew.

Skinning rabbits for fur or for food.

It was the aftermath of industry, when industry had spent itself and moved away, delivered too well on its promises, and had to take them back. The problem was, we gave them more, and they expected more again, they wanted things and time to use their things.

We forced the needle up and then we couldn’t keep it there.

Hunting knife drawn down an exposed belly, a beaded line of blood before it’s pulled apart, the anatomical candor, not animal, not meat,

it was a natural thing but one we’d never seen before.

———————————

What this boy did best was what could not be used for anything.

Through every stage of history, we try to find the thing we recognize.

What this boy liked best,

the end of everything, over and over again.

———————————

In the aftermath we see a clean trajectory, a feat that we can easily repeat. Simple, like a gun. A bullet through a barrel through a head.

Of course we don’t have many relics from that first time—a little twisted rebar from the tower. We know we’ll never find the hull rusting on the ocean floor.

That’s why the picture is significant.

We fought the only way that we were able to—we calculated things the world had never known. We carved pieces of a puzzle we made up as we went on. We knew what we were after—or we knew what we were starting from. It’s hard to realize now that we were so unsure—



Mary has the ability to participate while being outside of.
Thus, when irrevocably outside of such as in the past, she can extrapolate the participation in.
And then build suddenly deeply meaningful generalizations on top of this:
How was it supposed to work out, raising the young and having a society?
At times, this book gives genuine philosophy, as opposed to the faux Wittgenstein that so many of us crank out:
Their dream for an unmediated transfer from intention to matter was the subject matter.A response that acknowledged pointlessness by making a subject out of it.
I thought these lines would go flat out of context but no. Mary's book can be applied.
- the_delay.blogspot.com/2005/07/mary-burgers-new-book-sonny.html


Sonny is one of the most exciting texts I've encountered in some time. Thin, agile, light as air, and condensed to the point of delirious richness, it possesses the sort of elasticity that I find irresistible. Bed time reading, subway reading, a steady companion in a narrative way--there is propulsion--but also in the random entry. Am I the only one who prefers a morsel of language to then linger over as the subway rattles along? I don't need to cling to the sentences in an orderly narrative, and neither does Burger.
The man who thrived for fifty years on work he learned at twenty served his country in the war in a munitions factory and burned his lip at break time drinking coffee from a mason jar.

As fallout rained down on the milk cows, as Strontium-90 was pronounced on the radio and overheard in grocery stores.

This man kept a balance in the bank. (34)
What confident precision this is, shifting from declarative to litany:
Who tried to kill herself but couldn't die.
Who packed her clothes and waited for the train.
always with pristine imagery:
The atomic cattle, like the atomic cat, grew small white stars where the fallout rained on them.
This world assembles, is liminal, is kaleidoscopic and angular as the author repeatedly detonates the banal:
Adhesive tape, the last thing added to the bomb.
I could simply list the lines that glistened and pierced. I could try to put my finger on the promise of the line, the exact blend of chaos and order that makes this book sing even as it reminds me of the tin, atomic air, the militarization of domesticity, the path we are all locked into, and yet it is impossible to put down. Or at least to put down for long...

A stack of reading notes on yellow paper awaits the healing of my wrist. Meanwhile, I'm going back to Burger. You can find out more the author and text here, and you can read an excerpt here.
- lemonhound.blogspot.com/2006/07/mary-burger.html

 

An Apparent Event: A Second Story Books Anthology

Introduction

December 2005

An Apparent Event brings together the nine chapbooks published by Second Story Books between 1998 and 2002.  I started Second Story Books after co-editing Proliferation magazine with Jay Schwartz and Chris Vitiello for five years.  Proliferation was our attempt to locate ourselves amidst the multiple, decentered practices of new writing that were our legacy and our context then, work informed by New York School, New Narrative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, aleatory, visual, post-colonialist, feminist and a few dozen other practices.

In the course of editing Proliferation I found I was most interested in work that explored narrative, the representation of events in language.

Apparently, by all appearances, events are taking place.  We engage with life as if events are taking place, have taken place, will continue to—as if we exist in time, with changes occurring in time.  Narrative, the representation of events, of changes taking place in the experiential realm, permeates our understanding of and engagement with time.

Narrative exists in the tension between disbelief and its suspension.  The seduction of narrative is that it creates an experience of events in time, but that we are aware, in the midst of this experience, that what we are experiencing is a representation.  Narrative is not a window onto the world, a transcription of an interior monologue, or a faithful account of things as they happened, though it may assume any of these guises or others.  Narrative is a language event, through which we experience events taking place in time.

As participants in narrative, we have the power and the pleasure of being in more than one place at one time—or, of being at more than one time in one place. We engage with the events of narrative as changes taking place in time.  And, we engage with the narrative as a language artifact, we encounter the operations of the text and the ways in which the text creates representations.

It’s this multiple engagement, this simultaneity of representational and experiential time, that makes for the complex possibilities of narrative writing.

Is narrative an engagement with events, or an enactment of events?  Is our understanding of time, of events taking place in time, separable from our use of narrative to represent events in time?  Or, are all of our understandings of time, of events in time, ultimately instances of narrative?

How we understand the operations and assumptions of narrative is fundamental to how we define “reality”, how we decide what is relevant or significant—how we decide what anything means.

The writers collected here are in one way or another invested in the high stakes of portraying events in language.  They’re attentive to the malleable boundary between experience and representation, and to the consequences of their activities along that boundary.

These works enact strategies for self-reflexively examining the assumptions and consequences of narrative choices, and implicate readers in doing the same:

Renee Gladman (Not Right Now) makes a continual migration between “I” and “you” and “we” through a narration that fixes and unfixes its location in relation to self, other, and world in an unsettling rhythm.

Lauren Gudath (The Television Documentary) exploits the false stability and imperfect authority of documentary to examine the irrational, noncommunal origins of language.

Brenda Coultas (A Summer Newsreel) acts as a poet-archivist, gathering and interpreting artifacts of various pasts and examining the implications of her own acts of interpretation.

Jacques Debrot (Confuzion Comix) imitates scholarly authorial personas in works that satirize consumerist habits of writing and reading.

Avery Burns (A Duelling Primer) creates precise, intricate instructions and descriptions for locating “you” in space, in specific relation to an other who is opponent but also mirror.

Kristin Prevallet (Red) mimics the crisp, brusque sentences of crime fiction while eschewing plot machinery in favor of ambiguity about the nature of narration and of event itself.

Gregory Brooker (Spirit’s Measure) experiments with a compositional method that has prophetic origins but is here used to create to a secular Williams-esque collage of American language.

Camille Roy (Craquer) generates a loose-limbed yet exacting memoir of family and class identity that proceeds through relentless analysis of her own motives and strategies in telling this story.

My piece (The Boy Who Could Fly) is an effort to bring together far-flung narratives of heroic tragedy, to see how overlapping versions of that archetype refract and collapse in on one another.

Taken together, these works make a lumpy exquisite corpse, a mismatched set whose contingencies and peculiarities begin to suggest how many more possible ways there could be to understand event.

 

Introduction

From Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative

An anthology of essays on theories of narrative practice, by forty-eight writers from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.  Co-edited by Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy, and Gail Scott.

Published by Coach House Books, 2004.

When I got there (eventually, to San Francisco), I found there were other writers who, like me, were just then calling ourselves poets but doing a kind of writing that often looked like prose and talking a lot about narrative.

Narrative meant that you could be a person having experiences, and you could admit and affirm in writing that you, the writer, had experiences and thought about them and the meaning of them; that personhood itself, if a fiction, was no less useful for not being “true”, that in fact its very artifice made it a fruitful literary conceit; and that all this, the being, the experiencing, the thinking, the meaning, the artifice, could be the stuff of your work.

And, though personhood might be avowedly fictional, narrative was not the same thing as fiction, which insisted on wholesale invention (with resemblance to persons living or dead etc etc ritually denied); it was not the same thing as autobiography or memoir, with their adherence to what was (again, troublesomely) “true”.

We had started from the point of poetry (or migrated to it) because, I’d say, we were interested in the distillation of semantics, of texture and tone and image and rhythm and sound, the scrupulous attention—to the point of stall-out—to the operations of meaning and representation and power all afforded by the form called poem.  A poem allowed for a semantic self-examination that could become an end in itself, in a way that narrative forms—conventionally, at least—didn’t allow.

But the potentially closed circuit of semantic or material attentiveness in poetry also turned out to be a convention, a limitation that couldn’t support some kinds of meaning.  In particular, what I wanted from narrative were the tools for exploring being in time.  I needed writing about being a person among other people being in time—the knotty, sustained working-through, the confusion and thrill, the impossibility and necessity, of existing in a world with others.

Writers I knew then (in the 1990s) who were exploring the fulcrum between narrative and poetry had behind us the strenuous self-situating discourse of Language Poetry, the self-mining story telling of New Narrativists, and the inter-genre investigations of a variety of their contemporaries.  We knew these groups had battled one another, but for us the lines of difference they left behind were more like paths than walls.  New Narrative practice, interrogating the subject by exposing its simultaneous self-effacement and self-aggrandizement, by representing event or identity or experience while taking apart the materials of representation, looked like a counterpoint to Language Poetry, interrogating the semiotics of meaning and the materiality of language at the level of the sentence, the word, the phoneme.

The projects of my peers that have emerged since that time gamely recombine practices that were once (and are still, in many other venues) relegated to either poetry or prose.  Works by Betsy Andrews, Taylor Brady, Aja Couchois Duncan, Michael du Plessis, Renee Gladman, Rob Halpern, Laird Hunt, Pamela Lu, and Maggie Zurawsky, to name just a few, push us to understand that narrative can merge artifact and artifice and a deep awareness of the two.

Social identity, political argument, philosophical questioning, can mingle with travesty, delusion, fantasy, audacious claims to reality, among the media of image and description and figure and sound.  To break with the unexamined assumptions of the story, and to bring the poem out of its timeless solitude, call for open-ended conversation on what narrative writing can be.  This anthology is a conversation about such possibilities.

Images
Razzle Dazzle Melanism
Traffic Signals
Movement Is Measure
Don't Repeat This
Eh?
Ocean Blocks
Ocean Deer
Clean Streets Initiative
Branches
Mechanical Botanicals
At Home
The Nomad Series
The Bart Series
The CCA Series
The Oakland Museum Series




Frankly Explicable: A Conversation with Mary Burger

  

The art of poetics begins with the intersection of the visual and the unseen. Word gives way to image, image to thought, thought to inspiration.
As communicators, human beings desire to bring value to the exchange—something ambiguous in the visual art world, value. What holds meaning for one may not for another, and what inspires is highly subjective.
More than value, we search for meaning. Who are we? To what do we devote attention? On what do we spend our time?
The idea of categories amongst thought makes experience easily interpretable. But what of the things that meet and mingle? Where does communication end and poetry begin? How is experience cataloged as “art”?
Writer, visual artist, and environmental designer, Mary Burger is interested in cross-genrewriting that merges aspects of poetry, essay, and fiction. Her books include Then Go On (Litmus Press, 2012), a collection of lyric prose pieces, Sonny (Leon Works, 2005), a novella on the Trinity bomb test, and A Partial Handbook for Navigators (Interbirth Books, 2008), writings about geography and social space.
In this post, we’ll learn a bit about Mary’s approach to writing and visual art, and the pursuit of intersecting questions we call “experience.”
When you first approach a new work, what freedoms do you give yourself to explore with words?
“New pieces well up from any number of places.  I don’t put any restrictions on myself in exploring new pieces.  If a piece seems like it will keep going (many don’t!), I try to have a sense of its shape or motivation (which might, after the fact, be described as form and content.)  But those conceptions always change as a piece evolves.  For a piece to do anything interesting, I have to be in a state of continual discovery and redefinition.”
Your knowledge of literary criticism is one of your strengths as an editor, publisher—and also a writer. What, in your opinion, makes good writing? What elements of literary criticism do you employ when writing your own work and when reading others’ work?
“For me good writing is anything that allows me as a reader to be in a state of discovery—the same state I aspire to as a writer.”
Of your completed works, which do you feel is your greatest accomplishment and why?
“Two stock answers: no one can choose among their own children!  And, my newest work is always my favorite!
And a third thought: on some level everything I write is part of one lifelong investigation, so in that sense it’s all one long, varied work.”
How do you know when a poem, chapbook, or other piece of writing is “done”? (Is writing ever “done”?)
“There’s a combination of excitement and satisfaction when the work feels fresh and not over-worked.”

In an interview with Angel Dominquez, you mentioned that landscape architecture and design is “a time-based medium on the scale of seasons and years and generations and epochs.” How do you think this intersects with writing, and particularly poetry? How do you think that landscape architecture is like writing?

“Landscape architecture is like writing only in metaphorical or analogous ways.  Working with landscape involves understanding contexts, processes, consequences, ecology, economy, politics, etc—all terms that we can apply to writing, but building a park and writing a book are pretty different.  Making parallels between these activities helps us understand our assumptions about landscape, nature, or ecology, and helps us see the conceptual frameworks we use as writers.  But I think it’s important not to blur the definitions too much.”
You also have stated that you believe “soil has narrative, history, timespan.” What do you mean by this statement? In what ways do you feel this statement hints at a political context? Additionally, how does landscape architecture and urban design inform our daily experiences?
“We—people generally interested in the future of life—are starting to understand what soil scientists have long known: soil is not inert, it’s a living ecosystem.  Like air and water, soil is affected by human activity.  If we want soil to remain viable for sustaining life, we have to pay attention to its processes.
Entire professions are devoted to exploring how landscape or urban design inform our experiences—I’ll simply say I’ve always been interested in understanding the stories of the places around me, how they came to be the way they are.”
You mention that as a writer, you are always immersed in research. How does research inform your writing and how do you balance the time between research and writing?
“Writing for me is a process of pursuing questions I’m interested in.  Reading and writing go hand-in-hand in that process, of posing questions, exploring them, and finding new questions.”
Your current project Red Dust Tangle also looks at environment as experience and how we find our place in that environment. I’m intrigued by the passage:
“In the way that the flat, regular street grid accommodates movement equally in any direction, the houses, built square to the edges of the building envelope, made the streets seem like landscapes without mysteries.  But the pervasive alleyways made a nameless second grid that shadowed every street and harbored what couldn’t fit in the named places. 
A shadow is a ruin of the original.  The clean edges reappear as a monstrosity, as an alien erupts from within.  It was the figure-ground battle, one always struggling to overtake the other.”  

What do you hope this passage evokes for readers? What message are you conveying about environment, experience and the intersection of these things?
“For me, these lines are about looking for relationships between the frankly explicable and the mysterious or the elusive.  The built, spatial world is the material setting where experience takes place.  We ascribe meaning to it as it shapes us.”
This work also includes images of the labyrinth, compartmentalization, passageways, order, and similar structural elements. What comments are being made about the urban infrastructure in this work?  What does it indirectly say about the natural environment? How is this imagery used as a metaphor for something deeper?
“I got interested in the labyrinth as a place of intentional obfuscation.  Generally, the conundrums or problems we run into in life don’t have specific authors or solutions.  A labyrinth implies a designer.  In this narrative, I think the labyrinth may be about the ways that we construe our own agency as we encounter the various challenges and opportunities of living.  The urban scene, the environment are…contexts for living.”
When you hear the phrase “everything is connected” what do you think about? How do you think that the phrase “everything is connected” relates to the craft of writing? Art? Landscape architecture or other?
“I think of Juliana Spahr’s book This Connection of Everyone With Lungs.  Also I think of what I know about interspecies dependency, which is basically the story of all life.  Anything made—writing, art, design—comes out of a specific context, and the meaning of anything rests on how we understand its relationship to context.”

- kellylydick.com/blog_everythingisconnected/tag/mary-burger/


Time-Stopping, Points of Friction, and Other Narrative Events: an interview with Mary Burger


Writing available for download (PDF files):
Talking About the Universe as if It Existed
Some New Opinions on Matter
The Boy Who Could Fly
All New Yorker Stories
Interview with Jacques Debrot
Poems:
Esp. in being an entrance, a passageway, a constriction, or a narrowed part
Laugh of the Larynx
Your Golden Gate


San Francisco Bay Guardian (review of Biting the Error)
http://www.sfbg.com/39/34/lit_experimental.html


Mary Burger is a writer, editor, and publisher. Her books include the following: Sonny (Leon Works, 2005), The Boy Who Could Fly (Second Story Books, 2002), Thin Straw That I Suck Life Through (Melodeon, 2000), and Then Go On (Litmus Press, 2012) amongst others. She is co-editor of the anthology Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, and of Narrativity. She also edits Second Story Books.  She lives in Oakland, California. Her work may be found at http://www.maryburger.com