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Interview with Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

Prepared by Béné Meillon, carried out and edited by Noémie Moutel

Allison Adele Hedge Coke with Bénédicte Meillon, reading an exclusive and simultaneous French translation, 19th of June 2024, Banyuls, France.  Photograph by Athane Adrahane ©

 

How did you first encounter the ocean ? 

My parents met seaside in San Diego, California. We knew this as children and longed to see what they knew. Our drives visiting relatives through the US and Canada never included departures to the ocean and when I was, maybe 12-13, I ran away with my sister deliberately to see the ocean, for my first time. We arrived at night and walked to the edge of the water, listening to its incredible motion of sound, mesmerized at the starlight above and moonlight reflection on waves midst its reach to sand. By morning, it was clear experiencing oceans would be necessary throughout the rest of my life. The ocean left me not only humbled, but lovestruck. Lasting –

While working today, I’m living and working not far from where they met.

How would you define the ocean ?

Immensely essential. Heartbreakingly gorgeous, thrilling, immersive, and the sincerest illusion with realistic values we can only beg to fully understand. Ocean is both beheld by us and fully beyond us. Liminality in continuous motion, ocean is also immensely greater than anything we can imagine in our mere forms. 

97% of Earth’s waters are oceanic. 71% of Earth’s surface is ocean. Though each region of ocean has clear character, behaviour, luster, ecosystems/aquatic environments, habitats, biotic/abiotic factors, light penetration, salinity, function and for anyone not immersed specifically, certainly mystery to almost all humankind. The global ocean is the world, really. Everything else here is akin to Ocean in some manner. The mother of the mother, father of the father, grandparent and child of relationship to the planet. She is our provider, protector, and if we challenge her wrongly, our greatest loss and likely demise.

What sensations do you experience when you are near or in the ocean, or water more generally ?  

Peace. Perfect. 

Remarkable synchronicity. Belonging, ease… Comfort, yet considered with sincere respect for the known and unknown within water and water’s power and capabilities. Greatly beautiful and mightily terrible all at once. The ocean… What capacity!! Immeasurable! Harrowing and delightful. Undefeatable and yet horribly endangered by us in this ridiculous time.

What brought you to engage with a form of poetry that also includes scientific findings, lexicon and insights ? 

Scientific knowledge is utterly important to any deep understanding. I don’t perceive any use of a form of language as estranged from another, necessarily. These findings clarify in certain terms ways of perceiving, of anchoring our learning and experience, sometimes proving exactly what our insights provide, sometimes surprising and marveling us. My parents were from long lines of storytellers, musicians and singers, artists and craftspeople, from field laborers and horse people, practical linguists, from lives on rivers and waterways, and from mountains to valleys or plains. My father also became an environmental analytical chemist just before turning forty (civic work for the Department of Agriculture, then Helium Research, then for the Environmental Protection Agency when it opened) and throughout the rest of his working life (finally retiring from EPA). Dad largely raised us, and we wore (discarded) lab coats (from his workplaces) for housecoats as kids. Scientific knowledge seemed as natural as children’s tales passed down to us. For me, the blend is simply integral to sharing features of the planet, as we know it, understand and misunderstand it. Including all its lifeforms and belongings. Though a newer way to get to what the facts are, it is serving a greater purpose and helps to wade through misgivings and misunderstandings and begs for engagement. The richness in extensive vocabulary is akin to speaking in any language made for a specific and gathers momentum toward our perception of what it is we are amid. Our insights being our response to a connective force experienced with engagement. All of this is awash in the floating aspect of beingness, withness. Necessary.

What can poetry do for the ocean that scientific communication fails to achieve ? 

Musicality immersed within image-ridden capture, with lingual feat, can mesmerize and sway in ways that stir the heart – can create change within it – can serve the ocean by delivering it with grace into the human realm enhancing our ways of learning and perceiving, knowing, or being convinced that we can, do.

Poetry can be an illuminator of hard science, establishing points of awareness, contemplation, illustration, meditative musical persuasion/nuance providing readers/listeners with invitational, incantatory opportunity to be with science, its knowns and curiosities, its realm, while being embraced or challenged with content delivered in forms made malleable to suit content presented, enrapturing or entangling the recipient with facts through pleasurable belief in one’s connectedness. It is a bit of glory in what might otherwise seem droll. 

 How has the ocean informed and given shape to your writing of poetry in Look at this Blue? 

Incredible depth, embodying life in utterly unimaginable yet intrinsically realized forms. The ocean gives voice, sound and multitudes of silences erupting in general and specific caesura in the air above it, in the vast beneath its surfaces, and within our beingness in its presence. The sense of its parallels and departures gives generously to each bearing of testimony on the page and encourages a greater reasoning in conditioning line and enjambment throughout the poem. The poetic assemblage is not from layering of pre-existing work but is poetry happening while in the swim of it – a widely varying fully realized session. 

 When one considers the minor importance, or lack thereof, granted to emotions and affects in scientific research related to the ocean, do you think that could be explained by the fact that scientific productions require a certain inhibition, or even castration, of sensitivity ?  

Of course it could be explained this way. On the other hand, those sensitivities might persuade the scientist to be curious to begin with and to continue the work throughout the commitment. So, in essence, they may also be always present, however visible or acknowledged, or not.

 How has your work with sandhill cranes affected the way you write about the living world?

When you live in witness of Sandhill cranes, contemplate their councils, their behaviours, their ways of being in the world and understand the form they are in today matches their fossilized forms from 2.5 million years back, and so with the Crowned crane, a close relative to the Sandhill, with their fossilized remnants from 10 million years ago found also in Nebraska, that streak of continuity is fantastically remarkable as testament to their unique, yet shared, planetary embrace. They are still following the way of the inland sea that existed millennia ago, though the world literally changed in that time to be something else entirely.

Having spent years, seasonally in their midst, I reached a point where I felt that publicly sharing what all I’ve learned from them may disrespect their privacy in some ways. That deeper aspect of relational respect, for me, is the utmost demonstration of beginning to know a bit about someone else, despite our different forms. So, I’ve saved that for spoken word when bringing people into crane camp with me, to first protect the cranes from human misbehavior and next to offer to them bits to encourage their own beginnings in learning what and who is before them. 

What do you feel might empower scientists, in regard to their methodologies and modes of communication, so that their work might tug at their readers’ heartstrings ? 

Collaboration. Some of the most effective summits I’ve presented in gathered scientists, lawmakers, and arts/humanities presenters so that the triangulated presentations detailed, delivered, and defined what must be known through varying waves of impact, from distinct and united disciplines to bring about change of heart and consideration for what hard science calls for, politicians and lawyers can bring, if the people unite in the cause because they have been summoned to do so and with pleasure commit themselves to the cause before them. 

This is not to say that some scientists are not poets, musicians, artists. Of course, people may have multiple talents. Hard science and poetry are not necessarily mutually exclusive capabilities in any human’s endeavor in any actual respect. One can do both. Many have.

Your book of poetry Look at this Blue includes an abécédaire of endemic species native to California and the Pacific Ocean. As a result, your use of nomenclature turns into a poetic incantation, which summons existences amongst which some have gone extinct. Would you say that you are writing not about, but with more-than-human forms and beings, and that you might be striving for a form of reen-chant-ment of the ocean via poetry?

Hopefully, we are (on some level) always more with beings we engage with while writing, while living, while summoning care and consideration for and about through whatever forms we work through. In this case, full-on devotion to, in not only the naming, the terminology, nomenclature, but the gist and accolades belonging to each member of our world surrounding and surpassing us.

The work is meant to be incantatory, to enchant, to mesmerize, to enrapture, beguile, bewitch and to entrance and move people to do more for preservation and protection of the ocean, the planet, and all the members of the living as we know it and, moreover, what we cannot fully understand beyond us.

In your book of poetry Look at this Blue, which reads like an incantation composed with the Ocean, the title recurs throughout like a kind of mantra, or magic formula, via anaphoric repetitions. Could you comment on that formula?

Look at This Blue is a fluid improvisational jazz session poetic with waving sequences, movements, intentional and spontaneous solo and tutti departures and returns with variation-refrain meditations beginning with returns to the title phrase, then delivering multiple species endangered or worse, that we may learn at-stake value thereby. 

This in great part resonates with the reasons why the formula “Sea More Blue” was chosen by Béné Meillon for the research program she is leading. While Blue is a convenient catch phrase, or color, that works as a kind of metonymy for the Sea, the Ocean, and even water, there are many enquiries that go back to Antiquity as far as the Mediterranean is concerned, into how blue the Sea really is. In fact, in your book of poetry, you have found a way to do justice to the great palette of colors that are encapsulated within the blue of your title. Could you comment upon your use of color and the meaning of “Look at this Blue”? 

Speaking of spectrum; shorter waves, more energy, higher frequency, 450-495 nanometers of wavelength, our experience of blue, for me, resembles our experience of life, and resonates with water, ocean, a feature our experience with sky above as a big blue bowl of intricate design, sacred, surface to surface, and as deep within as light penetrates, configuring in various blues. 

Blue is a primary, a natural occurrence in color, it cannot be made by mixing and is foundational in mixing with two other primaries to make multitudes of colors as we experience them. 

Blue is wonder and wonderful. 

I’m thinking of a hydraulic organ in antiquity. An instrument employing water pressure to create resonant soundscapes through pipes. The mechanics there. The ceremonial significance, and acoustic value as backdrop to games, to gatherings, to public-facing outreach, demonstrative of what the player/s were delivering to audience and thinking of what value the Mediterranean gave to inspire such an instrument to cultivate gatherings with intentionality and improvisation. Collaborative musicality. Utterly innovative at the time.

Blue is our planet. 

Blue is our longing for what we’ve loved and lost and for what we’ve missed altogether in vacancy of access. Blue is what our skin does to light so that our blood appears in that hue when reflecting upon ourselves, though it is only illusion, it is also reflective of the waters within us in some fine way. Most edible bits of blue are superfoods to humanity. Perhaps all of blue is a super nutrient in some shifting essence of nourishment from existing, living. Both water and efficient flame consist in blues. Blue is life and lifeforms. From marine blue to azure, we are deeply wading in the blue world around us always and most of it is ocean. 

In North America, the first butterfly admittingly extinct by humans is the Xerces blue butterfly. Loss of dunes, their habitat. Butterflies are a keystone marker for some and bring us to face the other side of dunes and what within blue is also endangered there. The blue facing us.

Mutations sometimes offer new blues, as well. Some futuring there, or trauma response escalating blue. 

 At the 10th EASLCE conference in Perpignan, you gave a reading of passages from Look at the Blue by the Mediterranean Sea in Banyuls-sur-Mer, as a kind of offering to the Sea. Could you tell us about the thinking behind the way that event was set up, and maybe comment on the rippling effect of poetry? 

When Béné suggested Banyuls-sur-Mer, my heart shimmered a bit. She’d commissioned a quick translation of some passages she imagined there and then had her own turn at bringing another level of finesse to the translation in realizing the poetics of the work and bringing that to surface within the translation, as our offering, of sorts, to all attending, of course, but also the the Mediterranean (Blue) Sea behind us, backing us, conditioning us throughout the performance of the reading and our facing the seaside of the Sorbonne Observatory of Oceanography at Banyuls-sur-Mer (OOB) holding audience within some surreal reach of sea beyond us in both. Mediterranean / Humanity seeking to know the ocean. 

It was important to me to suggest that we read exchanges of the passages in English/French following one another along the way, like waves repeat the ones rising and receding before them, one after another, versus the full content each, to offer the experience in a more present and fluid sense, to bring the audience along with us in the orations. The passages were our offerings for the meeting of sea and attendees there. Our offerings to the Mediterranean and to those in witness with us there.

For me the best indicator of something like a synchronous life spark/charge from poetry/poets to recipient/s with fluctuation not unlike rippling effect. The connection is an efficient thrum, vibration, exchanging energy while entrancing and emitting and whilst reaching and receiving, the measure is present, and we are immersed and delivered with the best of what is poetry.

Banyuls now holds some of my heart and what is left of me there speaks to me in delicate and impactful memories. Like the sea, it takes what it wishes and flings back what remains despite its acceptance. I’m enraptured.

What other ocean artists, writers, or poets have you read whose work you would recommend? 

Immersion, Margaret Ross Tolbert

Stone Sculptures and Gyotaku, Karen Chadwick

Visual Arts/Activism/Education, Joy Lehuanani Enomoto

Iep Jaltok and 2 Degrees, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (Note to Editor: there is a diacritical missing here I don’t have on my keyboard, flat line over the n)

‘Āina Hānau Birthland, Finding Meaning, and The Salt-Wind: Ka Makani Pa‘akai, Brandy Nālani McDougal

Ask the Brindled, No‘u Revilla

“Because this One is Broken” Millicent Borges Accardi

Oceanic, Aimee Nezhukumatathil

“One Hundred Year Old Portuguese Cooking Club, a Triptych” Katherine Vaz (and so many more works by Vaz)

The Cold of Poetry, Lynn Hejinian

her beckoning hands, Arlene Biala

Muher ao Mar, Muher ao mar retorna, Margarida Vale de Gato

The Sea Within: a selection of Azorean Poems, Onésimo T. Almeida, George Monteiro, Editors

Ocean, Sue Goyette

Ponyo, Miyazaki

And of course, the well-collected and admired (but you already know them all)…

Matisse

Van Gogh

Chagall

Kandinsky

Monet

Cézanne

Aude Bourgine

Courbet


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Bénédicte Meillon (14 mars 2025). Interview with Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. Écopoétique. Consulté le 22 juin 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13h6g


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