Miriam Oneal had this to say about her poem: "Gerard Manley Hopkins said, "What you look hard at seems to look hard at you." This seems to sum up a way of being for a writer, though I think it's easier to 'look hard' than to be looked hard at. The transforming time for me as a writer, is when I finally stay still and become the poem's object, the seen thing. Then, the poem speaks, tells me what it wants, there is a kind of collaboration of energies."