Interviews

The Penwood Review

Interview with Editor Lori Cameron
Fall, 2025

The Syntax of Wonder: Edward Nudelman on Science and Poetry

By Lori Cameron, Editor

Edward Nudelman has built a career few writers can claim: decades of cancer research on one side, a steady body of acclaimed poetry on the other. Most people silo those worlds; he moves between them with an ease that raises genuine questions about how the scientific mind and the poetic mind talk to each other. That mix is what makes his work so engaging, and it’s where our conversation begins.

Let’s start with the obvious paradox: You’ve published 80+ scientific papers in cancer research, and now you’re toying olives and trigonometry into your poetry. What’s the secret sauce in your brain that lets both hemispheres merge seamlessly like that?

Perhaps the best way to start would be to cite one of my favorite quotes from Walt Whitman, in his renowned preface to Leaves of Grass:

“Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poets but always an encouragement and support… The sailor and traveler, the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, mathematician, historian, and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets, and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.”

In my geek brain, this truly excites me. When I started out writing poems in high school, I had no interest in science, though my parents had dubbed me the “absent-minded professor” at a very early age (and the moniker still applies). Whitman’s precocious statement on science and poetry, written in 1855, highlights an important observation in creativity: we extract and define meaningful experience based on our observations and recollections of the real world, through our senses. For me, the more I think about how observed qualia relate to the way I think in the way I create, the better writer I become. I realize this is not for everyone, but it works well in connection with my professional expertise. So, for example, if I want to get on my soapbox and make an oblique or metaphorical reference that has a scientific context, at least I trust the veracity of what I am talking about. That came up a lot during COVID-19, and continues today in the backlash against scientific inquiry and its role in social affairs.

In Nonlinear Equations for (Growing Better Olives), you blend the clinical precision of oncology with lyricism and metaphor. When you’re writing, do you consciously toggle between the analytical and the poetic — or is it one voice?

Toggling seems to be part of my inward thinking; however, I shift almost without control. So perhaps the end product poem amounts to one voice. If it’s not a conscious effort, I have a deliberate intention toward a cohesive whole, if that makes sense. I often wonder if that matters to the poem, particularly how overtly the scientific detail is revealed; so, I try to spice it up with metaphor and humor. From feedback, I think my poems are not dense or difficult — I’m a big believer in accessibility, though never at the expense of selling out to trendy fads or overused truisms. I hope the paradoxes found both in the natural world and the imaginative world are somewhat interchangeable, at least in the way they influence and affect our senses. I explore the impulse to know, as well as being comfortable not knowing. I was known as a very speculative scientist, but it just made me more committed to understanding problems and defining pathways to resolution. I believe that is one of my greatest gifts. I hope it is!

Do you write poems about specific experiences in the laboratory? Are they factual, metaphorical, both? If so, would you like to share one here?

Yes, a few appear in nearly all my books, but I don’t make them thematic. I write tightly fact-based poems stemming from my personal experiences in the lab, and I also write illusory poems that riff off of science, and hopefully make you think and imagine (see below). But my poems are nearly always punctuated by metaphor, especially by instances that have affected me in nonlinear terms (if you will). That is, the “what just happened?” or the “what is at play here?” vs. “here is some cool stuff, enjoy!” Following is the first poem in “Nonlinear Equations” (2023), which holds special meaning to me — the scene unfolding in real time while trying to develop a right-brained approach to a painfully complex scientific problem in my work:

Scientific Method

Owls in the orchestra, hooting disruption.

An old man napping on a park bench, sitting up

at dusk, puzzled by some forgotten urgency.

Through the dark network tunnels the forest mole,

solving for each blind X, as Y’s tender shoots

await a raccoon’s hungry chewing.

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid

collides with a planet. No more stegosaurus.

You rise before the sun and hit the road,

but the traffic still thickens, and rivers run dry.

A mountain punctures a thundercloud

without an injury we can measure.

A lone hummingbird on a branch nearby

flashes iridescent in the gloaming,

fogging from one shade of red to another,

like the blush of heartbeat in all things.

Loops and layers and dots, a scrim of beauty

that for a moment the old man understands.

And, without expounding too much, the title of the poem can help illuminate what I’m trying to show. What’s going on here is the lab of experience, drawing parallels with how scientists view methodology. Briefly, collecting data (the universe of wonder around us — in this case, a hummingbird); analyzing data (the old man’s senses are dulled, but he is still grappling with sounds and impulses); and, perhaps most importantly, conclusions are offered. We don’t know what they might look like, but in this case, there is a kind of apprehension that brings us awareness, some sense of meaning. That is a powerful recognition of our potential.

Science has its own poetry — syntax, rhythm, even mystery. Do you think your background in research shaped your method of lineation, or even the structure of a poem?

Science — or at least the appreciation of science, especially its beauty and complexity — strikes me as full of rhythm and syntax. Early poetry in history was full of the quest for knowing and imagining. In fact, creating and attempting to solve riddles is as old as poetry itself, and I think some of the art in writing poetry is figuring out what fills in the color and adds vitality to what we want to say. It’s somewhat akin to understanding how things work, then using those principles to build more interesting edifices. In a sense, a poem is a building, a structure we create, and though it has a base and height, it can possess near limitless reach and potential. I work hard at structure, trying to find a compromise between distracting form and the free quality of open space I admire so much in excellent poetry.

Your titles alone could win awards. “Out of Time, Running,” “Thin Places,” “What Looks Like an Elephant.” Are titles the first things that come to you, or do they arrive late, like party guests with better stories?

Thank you! The titles for my books always come after a full collection has been selected and vetted. Having said that, I often go into the writing of new poems for my next collection with a map of ideas and start filling up sub-files, such as “top choices” and “title options.” However, I can’t think of one title extracted from the latter folder. My method for choosing is based on the organic formation of the poems, how they speak to me, and as a basis for decision, I am looking for a common mood, context, or image that might evoke a feeling in my heart.

Your work often explores the delicate tension between certainty and doubt. How do you hold both at once, without losing your balance?

I’m always losing my balance — sometimes it feels right to be unsure. Owning uncertainty takes a lot of pressure off defensive habits — especially the compulsion to rigorously defend everything under the sun. I haven’t always felt this way; it’s been a more measured drift away from trying too hard, and a willingness to meet roadblocks and difficulties as portals to understanding. Being in charge of training new post-grads who came into our lab thinking they had it all figured out was a stretch for me. But the challenge helped me learn the skills of providing alternatives and options, in lieu of making rapid and unproven conclusions. You learn that a little hesitation can go a long way. Scientists can be very good at collecting data, making tables, running statistical error checks… and then be terribly poor at drafting non-biased conclusions. This can relate tangibly to the poet, I think: how well do we know our own work, how well do we know the work of other poets, what do we do with that information, and how open are we to self-analyze with an open mind to improve our craft.

In one of your lines, you write: “I’ve strummed a palm leaf to silence / my mind’s electronic hissing.” That’s both musical and strangely diagnostic. Do your poems often start with sound, image, or concept — or something else entirely?

I love to play off of the senses, such varied and surprising mediators of contact with our world. Still, like so many good things, they can also bring dissonance, confusion, and not uncommonly, pain. This extracted line from my poem “The Syntax of Stars” nuances on a short-circuited, tired brain that transmits little information and lots of angst-ridden, enervating tension. Believe me, I’m speaking from pure experience here. Beginning a poem is perhaps the most difficult challenge facing a poet. I put a lot of glide into my pen here, trying to freely conjure ideas and not get gimmicky. Often, first lines get reworked after the poem is mostly built. I’d like to think there’s some flair in the final product, something drawing you down the page.

Your latest book, “Thin Places,” has so many striking poems. Could you explain why you chose that title, and how it plays into the mood and context of the poems in the collection?

Thank you! It’s an important personal connection that hopefully connotes the mystery and emotional value of places. I first heard of thin places about ten years ago, from a fascinating NY Times article, and it touched me deeply. The phrase dates back to early Irish Celtic tradition, around the 5th Century, in which certain landscapes (islands, hilltops, stone circles, and coastal edges) were experienced by monks and other individuals as places where the boundary between the material world and the spiritual world was especially porous, or more closely accessible. The idea appealed to me because I have experienced such moments in my life, but the places have been common ones, such as the passenger seat of a car on a long drive, a neighborhood pocket park, or a pub where you’ve met a friend you haven’t spoken with in ages. Suddenly, you find yourself, unexpectedly, in a place full of awe and otherness. I think you’ll find several poems in the collection touching on this kind of kismet, the coming together of something unplanned, that delivers satisfaction.

Lastly, in a little lighter vein — if you could have dinner with one poet and one scientist, dead or alive, who would they be, and would you seat them across from each other or side by side to avoid a metaphysical brawl?

That would have to be Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) and Max Planck (1858–1947). Christina penned “Goblin Market,” combining musicality with great depth and feeling, amid the rigors of family entanglements, loneliness, and lifelong struggles of the Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry movement. Max, the father of quantum theory, studied black holes and was the first to substantiate that light was not just a wave but had measurable particle-like “quanta,” or discrete packets of energy. This has rocked our modern world. Christina and Max would be welcomed to sit wherever they chose — and they’d likely find a babbling, if not brazen, modern poet, stumbling over words and madly trying to find something on the menu that might interest them.

Poetry, Passion, and Physics

by  EDWARD NUDELMAN       Writer’s Digest, Dec 9, 2025

Scientist and poet Edward Nudelman dives into the relationship of poetry, passion, and physics (and the sciences) with poetic examples.

 If you ask a scientist what keeps them in the lab past midnight, you may not hear: “Answers!” It’s the jolt, the surprise of seeing a pattern where none was promised. Poetry runs on the same current. We test metaphors the same way we test hypotheses: with ruthless attention. We hope to tolerate ambiguity and the likelihood of being wrong for a long time before we’re right. 

In my practice as a scientist and poet, passion can never be heat without intention. It’s an ethic of looking carefully into the ether of what is unfamiliar. Science and art both wield the same two-pronged tool: a fidelity toward experience, and a commitment to excellence and discovery. What matters to me is not simply methodology, but deliberate action that transforms bewilderment into awe.

Gravity, among the vast
and thermonuclear,
moves in silent circles—
pound for pound
the weakest force,
connecting atom and star…

Gravity has you by your feet,
but your heart remains
a secret in the sway
of cloud and pillar.¹

In this excerpt from “Earthbound,” gravity’s force is weak, but magnified to dizzying heights in the mass and pull of stars. It plants us firmly on earth, even though we pine for freedom, without constraints. But the measurable and the mystical are inseparable—both gain meaning in their association and interrelation.

Indeed, much of science deals with the clash of one entity with another, be it the probability of an avalanche rolling down a mountainside or an ion striking a detector. This is where science and art converge: Both reach for clarity through a disciplined effort of discovery. It is not about the storyteller, but rather the story itself. How well are we conveying identifiable thoughts or images to reflect upon and make sense of the world around us?

What’s envisioned in the search and the process is realized in the finding. But how do we get there? What is the essential work to be done? I believe it begins with a kind of level-headed devotion, rightly placed. Crucially, passion is not obsession. Obsession consumes, passion steadies. In the lab, passion can sometimes look like writing protocols, producing charts, or drawing conclusions that follow from accurately controlled data. This becomes passion because we offer up a bit of ourselves in the struggle, expecting greater understanding as an endpoint.

On the page, in creative mode, passion might take the form of reading poems, sending up trial balloons, and coming back days or weeks later for revision. You begin building a poem, and the shape takes hold over time through its content, music, line breaks, and cohesiveness, to name a few factors. Form in a poem, like a protocol in an experiment, need not constrain, but build on the whole. Revision becomes a love, versus endless correction. Passion shapes what it encounters, not through indulgence but through discipline: the willingness to let language, or data, or a watercolor painting reveal more than what we thought it ever could.

So how do we deal with the tedium of process? One night in my laboratory’s tissue-culture room, a control culture bloomed where it shouldn’t have. The mistake traced back to a mislabeled buffer—mine. The protocol, not my pride, saved the week’s work with a careful pH and temperature adjustment. Craft, on a page or a lab bench, keeps us honest when surprise arrives. It’s in that moment of correction, humility overtaking impulse, that the bridge between science and poetry becomes visible. Each practice relies on the tension between expectation and error, and that tension is generative—it propels both scientific inquiry and art forward.

Further considering the process, I’m struck by the tension between inspiration and dogged determination. I’ve often been thwarted by a perceived oppositional struggle between linearity and global thinking. This dialectic can inhibit freedom to move freely through the process. In the poem “Chimera”, tedium for me becomes confessional, bearing great reward in “real time:” 

All that can happen in a test tube
will happen, in time’s ellipse...
I clocked each sneaking peptide
in real time, under the hum
of incandescence, or the dark cover
of a cold-room—its course a chart
of sky and dizzying canyon—
every nascent unfolding, a fresh
blueprint of skin, over a shell of steel.²

What fuels the fire? Not necessarily the vision of a favorable outcome, but the preloading: time given over to contemplation and study. Art and science foster imagination, cultivate conjecture and musing—be it an experiment in cancer cell growth, or a poem about the sorrow of great loss. Passion sustains even when discovery retreats, calls us forward, and builds endurance. The same fiery gaze that poetry demands powers progress in the sciences.

The following excerpt from “The Syntax of Stars” is not a dismissal of expertise, but a call to humility. The stars, like data, do not speak our language; we translate them into something identifiable.

We orbit the sun on our planet of particles
and wave, moving like rye in an open field.
What can’t be known can only be imagined.
But try to imagine a world without harmony,
the abstract dissonance of flux,
without losing grip on the rock wall.
I’ve strummed a palm leaf to silence
my mind’s electronic hissing, jettisoned
trigonometry in favor of a few visions
describing the lure of the commonplace.
Necessary equations await experts,
but the syntax of stars writes its epic
in a language everyone can understand.³

For me, this poem became catharsis, an unloading of rigid, sterile “fact” and an uploading of humble appreciation—a kind of “Occam’s razor” slice of a much larger pie. I have taught and trained postdoctoral fellows who were eager to learn, but more concerned with producing results than spending the needed time actually studying what needed to be done. It rarely looked like they enjoyed their work. Part of that is understandable; however, there is a way of thinking that inhibits creativity. I experienced it for years, but was fortunate to be challenged by mentors who encouraged free-floating and creative thought. From “Inertia Violated,” we can perhaps imagine ourselves to be above our limitations, yet forces are at work to derail the best-intentioned skill and craft.

It is catalogued in the book of lies.
It is stated categorically in the introduction
and nuanced in experimental method.
You are an ageless battery.
You are a perpetual motion machine.
Yet the sky, the dirt, the galaxy
red shift away from you.⁴

In fact, it is our limitations that define our efforts. Good science, like good poetry, names what remains unquantifiable after the data are in—and also admits when a result resists reproduction. We move forward in art by the quality of what we create. It’s a results-based practice, as is science… and what’s wrong with that? As long as it’s tempered by discipline and remains true to one’s passions.

I wrote “Scientific Method” in a burst of semi-clarity after taking a rest in a park, trying to capture the astonishment of the day’s discovery—the play between order and accident, observation and imagination. The poem materialized from experience and became a mirror to me of how both scientist and poet inhabit a discipline of noticing: where each insight is provisional, yet luminous.

Scientific Method

Owls in the orchestra, hooting disruption.
An old man napping on a park bench, sitting up
at dusk, puzzled by some forgotten urgency.
Through the dark network tunnels the forest mole,
solving for each blind X, as Y’s tender shoots
await a raccoon’s hungry chewing.
Sixty-six million years ago an asteroid
collides with a planet. No more stegosaurus.
You rise before the sun and hit the road,
but the traffic still thickens, and rivers run dry.
A mountain punctures a thundercloud
without an injury we can measure.
A lone hummingbird on a branch nearby
flashes iridescent in the gloaming,
toggles from one shade of red to another
like the blush of heartbeat in all things.
Loops and layers and dots, a scrim of beauty
that for a moment the old man understands.⁵  

Nature performs its own experiment in symbolic language. The lab becomes a meadow; the data, a heartbeat. The poem honors serendipity—the primeval engine of both creativity and discovery. If passion honors observation, certainly a writer’s attention to detail puts words down the page more properly placed and better loaded with meaning.

If there’s a physics of passion, it likely obeys a conservation law: Energy transforms, but the work is to give it useful form. Poems and experiments surprise and bring hidden rewards—they also demand a kind of surrender, letting go of certainty for the sake of discovery. Perhaps that’s the true cost: the vulnerability of revision and changing conclusion. It’s not easy to let humility overrule, to remain open and piqued for surprise. Science, like poetry, teaches us that meaning is not possessed, but conveyed. 

This little poem gestures wistfully toward a paradox that underlies much of inquiry: that even the most exact laws are written within the flux of many variables, that clarity is more often born from the ash-heap of chaos. It reminds us that understanding—whether poetic or empirical—always costs something of the self, and it’s always worth the effort.

Entropy

The word itself loses form,
as it glides out between teeth,
its consonants a dissonant tango
of tongue and lip, the mouth
barely opening, as if struggling
to spare its loss, to not surrender
whichever atom it was that glued
all the others together—
but its final syllable has left
the lips open, as a door in summer.⁶ 

Perhaps this is not so much an essay about cost, but about devotion. What I once thought of as labor—the repetitions of method, the endless corrections, the sleepless nights before an experiment or a presentation—may be closer to liturgy: a rhythm of attention that transforms effort into reverence. To practice science or poetry is to remain in conversation with the unfinished, to accept what refuses to resolve. The reward is not certainty but intimacy—a sense of belonging to the very processes that elude our control. 

There is something of value in that intimacy. Every act of attention requires a letting go: of speed, of comfort, of the illusion that we can master what astonishes us. Perhaps passion, then, is the name for this willingness to be altered by what we study—to let the experiment, or the poem, change the observer. What begins as curiosity ends as kinship. 

If science taught me to measure the world, poetry taught me to dwell in it. Together they form a single gesture: the soul reaching outward, the brain staying still long enough for the heart to catch up. I can’t say where one practice ends and the other begins; they share a common pulse. In that beat, I hear the old question—what is the cost of such work—quietly answered by passion itself. To look deeply, again and again in earnest, is not to lose oneself in detail, but to find beneath the concrete page a lyric line, a trace of the same enduring awe that began it all and keeps it moving forward.

__________________________

Notes:
¹ “Earthbound,” from “Nonlinear Equations for Growing Better Olives” (Kelsay Books, 2023).
² “Chimera,” from “Nonlinear Equations for Growing Better Olives” (Kelsay Books, 2023).
³ “The Syntax of Stars,” from “Nonlinear Equations for Growing Better Olives” (2023).
⁴ “Inertia Violated,” from “Thin Places” (Salmon Poetry, 2025).
⁵ “Scientific Method,” from “Nonlinear Equations for Growing Better Olives” (2023).
⁶ “Entropy,” from “Thin Places” (Salmon Poetry, 2025).

Savvy Verse & Wit

“Interview With 2011 Indie Lit Awards Poetry Runner-Up Edward Nudelman.”
By Serena Augusto-Cox
April, 2012

Writer’s Digest

“Interview with Poet Edward Nudelman,” by Robert Brewer
July, 2011

Fine Books Magazine

“Ed Nudelman's Arts and Science,” by Rebecca Rego Barry
July, 2012

Savvy Verse & Wit

“Guest Interview: Indie Lit Award Nominated Poet Edward Nudelman Interviews Poet Aaron Belz".”
April, 2012