How English and Biology Are Best Friends

If you had told me in my first year that studying English and Biology would eventually feel like doing the same thing, I probably would have laughed, cried or dropped the course outline. Honestly, I might have done all three at once. But here we are, three years later, and I’m having the time of my life! The Bachelor of Arts and Sciences program at the University of Guelph allows me to split my time between English, Creative Writing and Biology and somehow these fields keep running into each other like they have assigned seating together in a crowded lecture hall (maybe Rozanski). You wouldn’t expect poetry and biology to hang out together, but they do, and their friendship is pretty inspirational.

Poetry is like a lab experiment in disguise. You test things. You mess around with timing, phrasing and energy. You figure out what works by trying it, failing a little, then trying again. Slam poetry makes this even more dramatic. There is something critically performative about it: a very subtle shift (like the way you stress a syllable, the pause you take, the way you hold your hands) changes how your audience experiences the piece. The audience is not passive; they react in real time, and those reactions loop back into how you perform the rest of the poem. It’s this live feedback system that makes poetry feel electric and unpredictable. I remember one performance in particular: I was in the middle of a stanza, halfway through a line, when my brain decided to take a short vacation. I paused. Total brain glitch. But in that moment, the room went completely still. People leaned in, eyes wide. I froze for half a second, then finished the stanza, pretending it was intentional, pretending I had been building suspense this whole time. The result? The final lines landed with more weight than I had ever experienced in rehearsal. It felt like discovering a new chemical reaction, but the ingredients were my voice, my nervous energy and a pinch of panic. What I realized in that moment was that these “spontaneous” performance moments are rarely random. They emerge from a complex web of mental processes working together: creativity, memory, emotion, attention and muscle coordination. In some ways, it’s like your brain becomes a stage manager, quietly cueing the lights, the sounds and the movements. In that sense, poetry and science (or an English minor and a Biology minor) are way closer than they look on a course calendar. Both are about observing, experimenting, hypothesizing and responding to feedback in real time.

Writing a poem often gets romanticized as pure inspiration, but honestly, it feels a lot more like tinkering in a lab. You make a tiny adjustment and suddenly the entire mood shifts. You change a word, rearrange a line, experiment with rhythm and everything else moves along with it. It is deliberate, painstaking and endlessly iterative. I remember a workshop where I swapped a single word in the opening line of one of my poems. The meaning subtly shifted, the rhythm felt different and my classmates’ reactions completely changed. For a moment, I sat there pretending this was intentional genius instead of a last-minute panic edit. But it reminded me exactly of doing biology labs: change one variable, tweak one light exposure, adjust one chemical and suddenly your fruit flies are moving like they’re auditioning for a sci-fi film. Poetry and science both require patience,
attention to detail and the willingness to embrace uncertainty. Sometimes you have no idea what’s going to happen until you try it and sometimes it completely surprises you. Both are about noticing patterns, testing and adjusting. Both involve the thrill of discovery, the frustration of failure and, most excitingly, the satisfaction of seeing a prediction or a line of verse actually come together and work!

Studying biology has made writing poetry feel easier and harder at the same time. I used to think poems were just emotional experiences that people either felt or didn’t. But biology shows that something very specific is happening in the brain during those moments. The limbic system is buzzing with emotional processing. The hippocampus is pulling up memories and imagery. The prefrontal cortex is working overtime to keep your thoughts organized so you don’t forget your next line or accidentally sob mid-performance, though I’ve been there! Even the pauses, which are the moments that typically feel natural and dramatic, are choreographed behind the scenes by your nervous system. I once spent hours in a lab tracking how fruit flies moved and rested under different lighting conditions. Initially, this felt totally separate from anything creative, just long rows of data points and graphs. But the longer I stared, the more the patterns began to feel familiar. The bursts of activity and periods of stillness started to resemble the rhythm of a poem. The movement of the flies became almost musical and it reminded me that rhythm exists not only in art but in biology. Timing, repetition and variation are as crucial to life as they are to verse. Both require attention to detail, observation of patterns and the recognition that something beautiful can emerge from the smallest adjustments. Understanding these processes also changed how I think about performance. Knowing that the audience’s brain is actively interpreting every pause, every gesture, every inflection gives a new level of respect for the craft. Poetry is not just words on a page but a dynamic system that engages the minds and bodies of both the performer and the audience.

The Bachelor of Arts and Sciences program has been a playground for these kinds of experiments. It encourages us students to let disciplines talk to each other instead of sitting in isolation. Biology explains what’s happening in our brains and bodies during moments of emotion and attention. Literature and writing explain why we care, why we respond the way we do and what it all means. Put them together and suddenly human experience becomes a much more interesting picture. Reading or performing a poem stops being just an artistic exercise. It becomes a study of behavior, perception and cognition. Likewise, scientific data stops feeling like cold numbers and starts to feel like stories about living beings. So, we get organisms trying to navigate their environments, humans trying to process emotion and poets trying to connect. Both are concerned with patterns, both are concerned with outcomes and both are, in the end, about meaning. Poetry becomes a laboratory of attention. The writer experiments with rhythm, line breaks, sound and gesture. The audience responds. The writer adjusts. The cycle continues, each performance producing slightly different data that informs the next iteration. It is iterative, it is analytical, it is emotional and it is deeply human.

The more I move between arts and sciences, the more I suspect poetry might secretly be a scientific process and science might be one giant poem in disguise. Poetry is this incredible mashup of imagination, memory, rhythm, emotion and physical expression. Biology gives you a backstage tour of how all these systems are orchestrated. The two fields borrow notes from one another and collaborate in ways no course description could capture. I remember attending a poetry reading about grief, sitting not just with the poet but with the audience. I noticed subtle shifts in posture, the collective pause as a line hit, the quiet exhale when tension resolved. The room moved as one but silently. The poem had become both the words and the nervous systems of everyone present. It made me realize that arts and sciences are not separate: they are complementary. One observes the heartbeat, the other observes the metaphor. Both are necessary to understand the full experience. Poetry and biology both teach patience. Both teach observation. Both remind us that curiosity matters. They also teach the thrill of discovery and the importance of iteration. In both, the smallest changes can have huge effects. A single word in a line can be as impactful as a single variable in an experiment. Both require you to pay attention to patterns, anticipate reactions and sometimes embrace chaos.

If there is one lesson I’ve learned from bouncing between poetry and science, it’s that understanding grows wherever curiosity and creativity overlap. Poetry, when seen through a scientific lens, is both a question and a tool. Science, when viewed through art, is both experiment and story. The two together expand how we see the world, offering insights that neither could achieve alone. Thinking about it makes me wonder: what if we treated every discipline this way? What if we approached every field with both experimentation and imagination, with curiosity and patience, with attention to both detail and beauty? Science can be poetic, art can be analytical. Numbers can tell a story, metaphors can reveal a system. There is so much to learn when we allow knowledge to cross boundaries. It might not solve all the world’s problems. Deadlines, bureaucracy and human error will still exist. But, it would definitely make the work more interesting, more connected and more joyful. Maybe the world would be a little more like a performance and a lab at the same time: messy, alive, full of potential and completely worth showing up for.

So yes, poetry and science are not just compatible: they are best friends. They teach us patience, observation and wonder. They make us notice patterns, celebrate small discoveries and care about both how things happen and why. They remind us that learning is a process and that sometimes the best way to understand the world is to perform it, observe it, tinker with it and pay attention to the rhythms that connect us all. If every group project in the world combined poetry and biology, I think deadlines might be a little less stressful, labs might be a little more fun and maybe, just maybe, we’d start noticing the poetry in everything around us.