Wood has written poetry since he was a junior high school student. In graduate school, dissatisfied with the template for academic prose, he began an attempt to integrate and/or insinuate poetry into his work. In the latter 1970s he fused his poetry and his geography – exploiting the writing of poetry as a social science research method – and presented papers in verse at the Philadelphia (1979), Louisville (1980), and San Antonio (1982) meetings of the Association of American Geographers. At the 1980 Louisville meeting geographers snapped up 125 copies of Wood’s cycle, Night Lights: Data for a Theory of Distance, each with its note that, “This paper was delivered at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers …” The poems were the academic paper which was a cycle of poems …

In fact, Night Lights (1980) had been extracted from Getting: Data for a Theory of Distance (1981, where the Night Lights poems were numbers 56-71), and Getting was the fourth in a series of attempts to utilize poetry as a research method. Wood regarded his earlier cycles – Moving: A Transactional Analysis of Man-Environment Relations (1975), Turning: An Analysis of Man-Environment Relations (1976), and Sitting: An Analysis of Man-Environment Relations (1978) – as straight-up social science no less than poetry. Moving documented a move from Worcester, Massachusetts, to Raleigh, North Carolina; Turning tried to get a feeling for the ways the new environment was initially understood; Sitting was about settling in.

With Astronomy, in 1981, the work took a turn toward poésie concrète in an effort to demonstrate that it was possible to reproduce an illustrative Chinese ideogram in English without the use of what Wai-lim Yip referred to as “logical links.” Two years later Meteorology followed, with Geology in 1984. Collected they were called Natural History.

A cycle of love poems, Tu: Echoes of an Ancient Song (1982), was followed by 435 Cutler Street (1986) and Leaping and Laughing (1999). Laying Welded Rail on the Southern Tracks between the Prison and Purina Plant, 18-19 May 1978, extracted from Sitting, was issued as an individual piece in 2005.

Though Wood distributed hundreds of copies of the mimeographed collections, the work was largely if not entirely ignored in geography. In his “Presidential Address: Beyond Description” (Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75(4), 1985), Peirce Lewis alluded to Wood’s poetry along with other of Wood’s work “available only in mimeographed form;” and in a review article, “Geography and Literature,” in Progress in Human Geography (1988), Douglas Pocock cited Moving, Night Lights, and Getting as well as Wood’s short story, Misplaced. Generally the work was dismissed as quixotic when acknowledged at all.