Newswise — Saint Michael's College students, faculty, staff and visitors can now leave messages for each other, birthday greetings, love letters, poems or any other sentiment, written in movable stones. A first in the country, so far as is known, Word Garden was installed July 12th on the campus of the liberal arts college in Burlington, Vermont.
Concrete poetry will now emerge and re-emerge on the campus green in the word garden, a circle about 60 feet across filled with small pebbles and surrounded by large boulders and encircled by shrubbery. This zen-like garden that invites creativity, communication, meditation, and reflection has arrived on campus in time for summertime playfulness and in expectation of academic uses in the fall.
The garden is the combined effort of Education Professor Valerie Bang-Jensen, Biology Professor Mark Lubkowitz, Stone Artist Chris Cleary of On the Rocks Stone-carving Studio, Jericho, Vt., and the concerted effort of Saint Michael’s associate director of grounds Alan Dickinson, who got the boulders and pebbles in place.
“Colleges are about communication,” said Professor Lubkowitz. “This is life-sized magnetic poetry” for communicating.
Genesis of the projectChris Cleary made stone titles and benches for Saint Michael’s adjacent Teaching Gardens, also a project spear-headed by Bang-Jensen and Lubkowitz. Therefore Cleary thought Saint Michael’s would be the perfect recipient of his many words written in stone. Carved in a wide range of typographic fonts, on a variety of shapes and color of stone, the words were the result of the various stone projects stone-carver Cleary had created over the years. In time, he had a great number of words in stone, and did not want to get rid of them. So he conceived of a garden of words, which he has now created at Saint Michael’s.
FeaturesThe garden, now boasting 350 words on stone, will also contain two stone chess/checker boards, with colored stones for checkers and chess sets stored nearby. There will also be an outdoor chalkboard in slate, but chalk and erasers will have to be brought by instructors.
On campus for only a day, the garden is already stimulating the creative impulses of numerous passers-by, students, summer camp youngsters, professors, and others who are creating brief messages in stone.
“We’re very excited; it is what it says; it’s concrete poetry,” said Professor Bang-Jensen, who was confident that the Saint Michael’s spirit of community would keep the stones safely in the garden.
See the YouTube of the word garden being installed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAOR9U00SkY
Learn What Matters at Saint Michael’s College, The Edmundite Catholic liberal arts college, www.smcvt.edu . Saint Michael’s provides education with a social conscience, producing graduates with the intellectual tools to lead successful, purposeful lives that will contribute to peace and justice in our world. Founded in 1904 by the Society of St. Edmund and headed by President John J. Neuhauser, Saint Michael’s College is located three miles from Burlington, Vermont, one of America’s top college towns. It is identified by the Princeton Review as one of the nation’s Best 371 Colleges, and will be included in the 2011 Fiske Guide to Colleges. Saint Michael’s is one of only 270 colleges and universities nationwide, one of only 20 Catholic colleges, with a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Saint Michael’s has 1,900 undergraduate students, some 500 graduate students and 100 international students. Saint Michael’s students and professors have received Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, Pickering, Guggenheim, Fulbright, and other grants. The college is one of the nation’s Best Liberal Arts Colleges as listed in the 2009 U.S. News & World Report rankings.
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