A Geo-ode Written in Stone
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2019-03-04T23:47:37+00:00
Boldly going where no rock-gardener has gone before, Pierre Jardin opened a final frontier in eco-poetry by producing the first ever Geo-Ode. Petriverse, or rock poetry, has been a key feature of The Petriverse since its birth in 2009. To date, Jardin’s petri-verse has featured pebbles fashioned into letters. With the Geo-Ode—defined as a lyrical earthwork in praise of the planet—he has broken down the boundary between language and stone altogether. “The Petriverse garden itself is ‘a Geo-Ode written in stone,’ where rocks arranged in letters and stones arranged in patterns are considered equal compositions in a celebration of the earth,” Jardin stated.
The Geo-Ode demands vigilance and care--to transmute stones into story, rocks into poetic expression, is to compose in multiple media simultaneously. As master gardener-artist Charles Jencks has put the matter: "Recounting the story of the cosmos with rocks and objects is like writing poetry with semaphore flags, an approximate affair. Detail, narration and nuance are severely limited by these media. In terms of drama the best one can hope for is a mixture of evocative phrases and cartooned ideas, something approaching the art of mosaic combined with Japanese rock arrangement, Constructivist collage, and word art (epigraphy)." (Jencks, The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, 191)
The Geo-Ode is the first genre to be certified as 100% Organic by the Society for Eco-Poetics. On its Words-Worth-Reading blog, Society GEO Rocky La Roche praised Jardin for tapping a new vocabularic vein that “lets rocks speak for themselves” and “levels the playing field of planetary poetic language.”
Jardin situates the Geo-Ode in a rich tradition of geo-aesthetics and stone appreciation. Chinese literati wrote poems on favored scholars’ rocks, and California rock-art star Richard Turner sees “a hidden story in every stone." The Geo-Ode turns the notion of stories hidden in stones inside out to reveal rocks as signs that crystallize into different kinds of compositions. A series of distinctive stones aligned in a gravel path become letters in lines to be read left to right (above). Expressive sculptures make "Stone Statements," where textures and markings on rocks seem to stand in for words or phrases, as in the round splotches on a small stone framed by pieces of petrified wood, resting on a dramatic mudstone (left).
The Geo-Ode is an avant-garde genre, yet it is anything but elitist. “Every rock enthusiast composes geo-odes on a daily basis,” Jardin generously observed. “They just may not have been aware of it until now.” The Petriverse comprises the ur-geo-ode composed in stone by Pierre Jardin on an ongoing basis.
