Levinas's philosophy of the encounter — the face-to-face meeting with the Other that constitutes the ethical relation — has influenced contemporary poets who treat the meeting with another person as a philosophically and morally charged event, as in the encounter poetry of Galway Kinnell or the civic encounters in Claudia Rankine's work; In Wordsworth's "spots of time," the decisive encounters — with the raven-snare, the abandoned boat, the drowned man — are moments in which the child is seized by something outside himself and permanently marked, enacting a philosophy of transformative encounter; A poet writing about travel or emigration might frame encounters with cultural difference as philosophically significant — the moment when one's assumptions are challenged by genuine otherness, when the encounter forces a revision of self-understanding; Martin Buber's distinction between I-It (instrumental) and I-Thou (genuine encounter) relationships provides a framework for reading poems about human connection — the lyric of love or friendship as the attempt to achieve an I-Thou encounter in language; Badiou's concept of the encounter (the event that exceeds calculation and forces a new truth into existence) informs a poetics of the unexpected — the poem as the record of an encounter that could not have been anticipated and that permanently alters the one who had it; Much nature poetry can be read philosophically as a staging of encounter — the moment in which the human speaker meets the non-human world not as an object to be used or a backdrop to be appreciated but as an Other that makes a claim