Now I will give you a piece of advice. I will tell you something that I absolutely believe you should do, and if you do not do it you will never be a witer. It is a certain truth. When your pencil is dull, sharpen it. And when your pencil is sharp, use it until it is dull again.

Words have a love for each other, a desire that culminates in poetry.

The words secret and sacred are siblings.

A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.

Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.

When I first encountered the poems of Jon Woodward, I was stunned into the state that is my life's joy-I was in the presence of the inimitable. Uncanny Valley extends that experience-almost into another dimension. These apocalyptic, pixilated poems forge a mythology of our ravaged culture, one that might have been written in the future. If you want poetry to give you a persimmon on a plate, look elsewhere; if you want to know what happens when seven trees fall on the highway and the story is told by a stutterer, this is the book, and it could only have been written by Woodward.

Every creative act is an act of hypocrisy and violence. You may have to think about it for a while, but I am sure you can discover your own.