ABSTRACT
For their chapter contribution, Maria and Arnalds were given the task of discussing their thoughts about soil genesis. The work started one Friday afternoon on Skype, developed into an exchange of e-mails, keeping in mind that first conversation, and resulted in a series of short poems. The choice of poetry as medium for “expressing the inexpressible” has a long history in the geosciences, from Goethe's metered musings about the earth and skies to the proletariat “bard songs” of the Leningrad Mining Institute's (LGI) geologist-poets. While Arnalds has generally been more involved with music and the short story format rather than poems, he began the work by expressing his soil ideas in poems, based on their conversations and inspired by Maria's art, with Maria adding more ideas and modifications, and gradually the poems were completed by cooperation between the two.
