The Victorian Poetry Party‪.‬

THE PARTY WAS SIGNALED BY A HUGE BANNER IN THE FOYER, "WHITHER Victorian Poetry?," and by that unmistakable roar of excited conversation--loud, confident, sophisticated, clever. Such a party roar is intimidating to the latecomer. I had a moment of apprehension. What exactly was I doing here? True, I, with a group of colleagues, was meant to draw some conclusions from these conversations. But that did not make me a participant. Was I a kind of oedipal eavesdropper? (Fretfully I realized that a person might be both a latecomer and a precursor figure, the worst of both worlds.) However, I pulled myself together and decided to listen for a while, and then to circulate among those clusters of eager talkers and ask them a few questions. (1) When I entered a wonderful sight met my eyes. Everyone was talking. There was dancing, and some people had come in fancy dress. The Multi-Dimensional Hypertext Line Dance was under way, where people created ever-changing pathways within the group with their bodies. Quite near and sometimes overlapping with it was the Intertextual Network Reel. The principle of this dance was that unless you touched at least two people simultaneously wherever you moved you were forced to drop out. Someone dressed as a satin-lined coffin containing the corpse of the Lyric "I" bumped into me. A beautiful screen-printed costume, covered in upraised pairs of hands signalling inverted commas with each of two fingers, presented itself as "Citation." A [pounds sterling]&$ sign floated past, "The Market." Just then some stately Neoformalists began an orderly patterned figure.