When we’re writing, I’m not sure that we think of the reader. It’s more that we pray not to lie, to get it right, so that if we’re writing about a tree, we get that tree and not a petrified log…. Every poem is a prayer against loneliness. When I write, there are two people: the poem I’m writing and the poem that wants to be written. When I re-read what I’ve written, that makes three. If I read the poem to someone else that makes four. Poetry and prayer spell loneliness.

–Sharon Olds