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I'll defend Lauterbach here. It's a poem about the processes of perception and being, and certainly not written without feeling. I've read better poems along these lines, attempting to honestly delineate the complex ephemerality of a moment - Ashbery comes to mind and even more, Rilke - but I hardly think it's "really really really terrible", nor does it strike me as that breathy kind of fake poetic Frederick claims it demonstrates. It strikes me that while Lauterbach's poem is about entering the specifics of a moment (eternity perhaps in Spinoza's sense, ie some kind of immanence), Larkin's is about transcendence, the absorption into a sublime whole. Totally different poetic consciousnesses. Not sure that it's useful to use one to bash the other. xA -- Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com