An annual symposium in Friday Harbor explores what happens when poetry and science coalesce.
Jen Strongin stands on the edge of a dock at Friday Harbor Labs at around 9 p.m., lowering a light into murky black water. Once immersed, the light gives the water an eerie green glow and a selection of translucent creatures crowds around the surface: a wiggling nudibranch, an undulating jelly, some scattered, dancing shrimp.
Researchers and students at the labs like to call this “Friday Harbor TV,” but it’s not meant for casual viewing. The humans present are crouched down, watching the creatures intently while capturing videos on their phones or jotting down observations in a field notebook. They’ve just come from an evening of sharing poetry and singing sea shanties around a fire. Now, they’re on the lookout for inspiration.
For over a decade, writers have convened at Friday Harbor Labs — a marine research center owned and operated by the University of Washington — for the annual Poetry and Science Symposium, an event born of an interdisciplinary program formerly offered by the UW. This year, the 60 symposium-goers dip their fingers into touch-tanks full of tidepool creatures, attend talks on fish armor and perplexing teeth and craft exquisite corpse poems on typewriters. Often, they’re joined by the labs’ researchers, students and artists in residence.
For poets, said symposium co-organizer Zachary Bivins, the natural sciences “are an incredibly rich source of subject matter and metaphor.” For scientists, looking at the world the way a poet does can be a boon: they learn to communicate their research more effectively — useful for grant applications and public outreach — and even refine the questions they ask.
At the heart of the weekend is the idea that, despite being cast as intellectual opposites, poetry and science belong together.
A place for poets
Poet and UW professor emeritus Richard Kenney first set foot on the Friday Harbor campus in 2001.
“I saw these professors in rubber boots and boats and I thought, that sure looks like more fun than the English department,” Kenney said. He sought permission to bring his creative writing students to the Friday Harbor campus and what began as a 10-day intensive eventually grew into a full-blown quarter-long course.
Kenney collaborated with biology professor Adam Summers — who researches the biomechanics of marine animals at Friday Harbor — to create a curriculum that included both the humanities and marine biology. Students explored texts like “Moby Dick” while also keeping logs of what they observed in the marine environment, later incorporating those observations into their creative writing. They learned about the anatomy and behavior of different creatures, and how they might describe them using metaphor. They considered what happens when a scientist starts to see with the eyes of a poet, and vice versa.
For Summers, the experience of working alongside Kenney was transformative. By looking at his research the way a poet might, he said, “my scientific inferences, the inquiries I was making, were better, they were stronger, they were more incisive.”
Summers likened the excitement he feels when noticing certain details in his research to the muse that visits a poet.
As for welcoming English students into science classes and asking science students to write creatively, neither professor had any hesitation.
“Basically,” said Summers, of his classes, “we observe things.” And the observational skills of poets are no less keen than those of scientists.
Kenney sees poetry and science as two means of asking questions and arriving at different kinds of knowledge. On the one hand, someone might acquire knowledge through learning about facts. On the other hand, they can become familiar through experience. Kenney illustrates the distinction with the example of an obstetrician’s knowledge of childbirth compared to a mother’s knowledge of it.
“Those ways of knowing are always operative — both in the sciences and in the arts — though likely in different proportions,” he said. “Art doesn’t progress in the way that science does, but what it can do is give people an actual experience.”
Sierra Nelson, a Seattle-based poet and previous instructor at Friday Harbor Labs, said that there’s an “ecological urgency” to the pairing of poetry and science. When it comes to protecting the natural environment and biological diversity, she said, “we need science to reach further in ways that people can feel and understand.”
In 2014, Nelson and Summers collaborated on an exhibition featuring striking, translucent images of stained fishes, accompanied by poems.
A continued conversation
The first Poetry and Science Symposium to take place at Friday Harbor Labs in 2011 was a series of presentations from MFA students who returned over Veterans’ Day weekend after completing an intensive summer writing course there. Undergrads in both the humanities and sciences attended, as did a handful of the researchers working at the labs.
UW no longer offers programs for English students in Friday Harbor, but the program’s legacy lives on through the symposium, organized and run by volunteers eager to see the tradition continue. Today, the event, which is no longer officially affiliated with UW, resembles something of a mashup between an adult summer camp, an academic conference and — some attendees joke — a wedding. “So, which side are you on?” they ask one another, meaning: poetry or science.
Most — but not all -— attendees are alumni of a UW program at the Friday Harbor. Some work professionally as writers or researchers, but many have landed in unrelated careers. They hear about the symposium each year via an email list.
“There are folks who are just interested in poetry and science, nontraditional students and folks who are interested in having this kind of academic space but in a way that’s more DIY,” said Nelson.
Many symposium-goers spend the weekend sleeping in cabins in the Friday Harbor campus and eating meals in the dining hall alongside current students. Ian Stevens, who worked with Bivins to organize this year’s symposium, said he enjoys the intimacy of the event: seeing the same faces every year, with a few new attendees mixed in.
“You have folks who have explored similar ideas… over the course of a decade, and they come together and each generation brings something different,” he said.
Summers says his own research has benefited from his interactions with students, both former and present.
“It’s bringing together super bright people to a beautiful environment and sinking into it with them. Without the aim of trying to produce things, with the aim of trying to understand stuff,” he said. “No matter how long you think, and no matter how long you write and tap your foot to get the rhythms, you’re not going to make the leaps. You need different minds.”
Good vibrations, bony armor and conveyor belts of teeth
On Saturday morning, symposium attendees file into a classroom and take their seats below a papier-mâché whale that hangs from the ceiling — a project of Bivins and Stevens, from when they were students in Friday Harbor. The whale is plastered with the pages of “Moby Dick” and took approximately three and a half copies of the book to complete.
Meg Vandenberg, a UW graduate student, kicks off the day’s presentations with a talk titled “Fish Armor is Cool.” Her research focuses on poachers, a family of small bottom-dwelling fish with exoskeletons that make them look like dragons. Scientists call these exoskeletons “bony armor.” Like the “armor” that a medieval knight might don, the poachers’ armor is generally considered defensive. Recently, though, researchers have begun to wonder if it serves other purposes as well.
In Friday Harbor, scientists have found that the drag created by the armor’s rough texture allows poachers to stay near the sea floor without getting swept away by a current. They’ve also found that, in some cases, the exoskeleton’s rigidity can help the poachers accelerate faster while escaping predators.
So, despite its name, that exoskeleton isn’t just armor.
“As soon as scientists begin using language to talk about what they’re doing, they’re using metaphors,” said Bivins. Think, for example, of an ecological “footprint” or an “invasive” species. Functioning as shorthand for complex processes, these terms are useful. But there’s a danger in oversimplification, too. Bivins wondered if referring to the exoskeleton as “armor” could obscure its other functions.
Of course, language, in its abstractions, can never perfectly represent the world. But for poets, that’s part of the fun. Nelson said language like this is precisely what gets poets excited.
“How we’re observing, and how we’re bringing language to those observations — poets really geek out about that.”
The linguistic geekiness was palpable when researcher Karly Cohen spoke of the spiral, “conveyor belt” of teeth found in the extinct Helicoprion and engineer Bart Boom — who presented on the undulating movement of skates and rays — said that “vibration” was “the answer to everything.”
There were presentations from poets, too, exploring the links between poetry and cognition or beauty and truth. Kenney’s presentation asked attendees to consider what “knowledge” and “understanding” mean in the age of artificial intelligence.
“Part of our premise,” said Nelson, “is that we’re not two different camps coming together, but that the scientists are often poets and artists. … The poets are equally interested in and engaging with science in their work.”
To that end, the symposium concludes with an evening of poetry composed by attendees. Scientists play with words and poets incorporate newly acquired scientific knowledge into their verse.
What can we learn by combining poetry and science? Bivins says that’s the question that “hangs over the weekend,” but he doesn’t think there’s one definitive answer. It’s a mysterious symbiotic relationship that, in Stevens’s words, “feeds the soul.”
— By Christy Carley
Also read in Salish Current:
• “The ratfish: a fish with forehead teeth,” Nov. 4, 2025
• “Poetry enters everyday spaces with festival,” Nov. 3, 2025
• “Friday Harbor researchers look to sea star transfers,” Aug. 19, 2025
• “Friday Harbor scientists research eelgrass ‘superpowers’,” Aug. 5, 2025
• “Bioregionalism, poetry and the democracy of the mind,” Dec. 3, 2024