Jane Grogan’s recent article in these pages, “‘Minor’ Epic as ‘Bad’ Poetry,” stages a gallant rescue of Spenser’s gorgeous but hapless Everybug, Clarion, from the unfortunate cobweb of confused critical nomenclature that doomed him to obscurity (yet more obscurity, after three centuries of it) through the twentieth century. Grogan rightly identifies our existing generic categories of minor epic and/or epyllion as insufficient to accommodate or contain a poem like Muiopotmos: or, The Fate of the Butterflie, with its complex, at times dazzling mixture of epic and satire.¹ In this endeavor, she joins a gathering wave of twenty-first century Spenserians—including Richard Danson Brown, Ayesha Ramachandran, Heather James, Rachel Hile, and Namratha Rao—determined not only to rehabilitate Muiopotmos, but to assess it fairly alongside Spenser’s other work, in particular as the microcosmic counterpart of The Faerie Queene.² It’s about time Clarion got his due from Spenser scholars, his natural allies.

The present essay, however, is not part of this communal effort to repair Clarion’s critical fortunes; rather, my shamelessly evaluative approach begins with the unscholarly assumption that no honest reader of Muiopotmos—professional critic or layperson—can consider so delightful and accessible a poem in any way “bad.” Spenserians are welcome to opine that their champion’s other bug-fable, Virgils Gnat, is a clumsy piece of work, or raise your hand if, like me, you find Mother Hubberds Tale obvious, overlong, and obstreperously one-note. As for the tradition of not granting an audience to The Teares of the Muses, it began with no less an authority than Shakespeare’s Theseus.³ But good luck finding anyone who has read Muiopotmos and dismissed it as boring or trite or ill-written.

As beast-fable, Spenser’s poem vies with Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale for subgeneric supremacy; as mock-epic, with Pope’s Rape of the Lock.⁴ Few if any Ovidian poems, including The Faerie Queene, approach the mythographic intricacy and elegance of Muiopotmos’s twin aetiologies for the butterfly’s colorful wings and the spider’s hatred of butterflies.⁵ Spenser’s fable is a synaesthetic tour de force: it looks fabulous (“Not halfe so manie sundrie colours are in Iris bowe, ne heauen doth shine so bright”); it feels fun (“And then about his shoulders broad he threw / An hairie hide of some wilde beast, whom hee / In saluage forrest by aduenture slew”); it smells and tastes both fortifying and delicious (“Sound Sauorie, and Basill hartie-hale, / Fat Colworts, and comforting Perseline, / Cold Lettuce, and refreshing Rosmarine”).⁶ But in the second half of this perfectly balanced poem—once Clarion’s misfortune properly begins in the central stanza (28 of 55)—each of these sensual delights is subsumed in a nauseating counter-current: Arachne shrinks into a “bag of venim,” her spider-son Aragnoll’s “bowels so with ranckling poyson swelde, / That scarce the skin the strong contagion helde,” and his web’s “lymie snares” and “subtill loupes” are Clarion’s dying sensations (352, 255–6, 429).⁷ Thanks in part to the little poem’s visceral engagement with the senses, any undergraduate still committed to reading books can find Muiopotmos accessible and rewarding (Teares of the Muses, not so much…), making Clarion’s herbs the gateway drugs to The Faerie Queene.

If so, they are the drugs Spenserians ought to be dealing nowadays. Vibrant as the scholarly Spenser community remains, cultural and institutional attrition has taken its toll on undergraduate and graduate curricula: let’s not pretend The Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene are as frequently taught or read in 2025 as they were yestercentury. Yet how many undergraduates (and their instructors!) might still flutter into The Faerie Queene on Clarion’s wings? How many graduate students (and their instructors!) might lose their fear of Renaissance poetics or high-Humanist intertextuality by sampling Muiopotmos’s herbs before plunging into The Faerie Queene’s Wandering Wood? At the same time, Spenser’s Ovidian insect fable is less rarified, more accessible than any of his other works: very few of us have tilted with lances, but who hasn’t admired a butterfly or been scared of a spider? Nor should we despair, in the age of YA novels like Percy Jackson and kids’ podcasts like Greeking Out, of an emerging audience even for the more abstruse aspects of Muiopotmos, such as the poem’s inset Ovidian aetiologies or its mock-epic allusions to Hercules’s lion skin and Achilles’s shield. If success in the classroom seems too limited a goal for a poem this colorful, funny, and merciless, all the more reason to amplify its appeal through new media: not some stuffy lecture-hall PowerPoint, but a proper work of contemporary art, reflecting but also updating the poem’s beauty, wit, and complexity. What Clarion needs now is what he has always needed: air time.

Cue the Moviepotmos!, a collaboration between artist and videographer Claire Krüeger and musician, composer, and sound engineer Spencer Kenney (with me tagging along in case they need any stuffy lecture-hall PowerPoints). With generous funding from the Southern Methodist University English Department’s Narrative Now project, our goal is to produce a visually and aurally innovative short film of Spenser’s poem, with Clarion’s charming-but-ominous visit to the herb garden serving as our ninety-second pilot, now available (exclusively!) to readers of this special cinema-issue of The Spenser Review:

Even if Clarion himself makes for a wayward and unhappy pilot, Claire, Spencer, and I are eager to complete his hapless, one-way journey. Indeed, by the new year, we hope to have the full film ready for distribution on social media, at academic conferences, on digital learning platforms, spangled around The Sphere in Vegas, everywhere.

But enough about distribution; more about the adaptation itself—that is, the art: when I first cold-e-mailed Claire and Spencer about collaborating on a short Muiopotmos film, I boldly assured them that ours would be the world’s first such production. O Clarionesque presumption! I soon discovered that INFRINGE, apparently an artistic collective devoted to radical hairstyling, were the true pioneers in this multimedia microverse, presenting a short Muiopotmos film with music and stills in their 2021 e-zine, in which a model’s intricately patterned hair extends both into Clarion’s wings and the spider Aragnoll’s web.⁸ It’s an impressive, even astonishing display, though perhaps a bit offputting to non-trichophiles, and devotees of the poem are left to wonder: what happened to all those delicious herbs?

Hence my continued confidence that a new and more colorful Clarion can still be the object of a wider viewership’s fascination and pity, and that there is still a captivating and insectivorous music to be heard emanating from Aragnoll’s hideyhole. So when a colleague shared some of Claire’s previous short films with me, I was excited to see that her work already encompasses both the microcosmically delightful and an undeniable sorrow that somehow remains witty and never feels oppressive. And when I met Spencer and learned that there could be so much more to a short film’s soundtrack than my usual mental-movie accompaniment of the Pixies and/or Mendelssohn, suddenly that tenth Muse of Cinematography barged into our Zoom meeting and sedibus æthereis spiritus ille venit, &c.⁹

Working primarily with paper collage and stop-motion videography, Claire’s apt description of her work as brightly colored, yet “with a feeling of melancholy, uncertainty, doom just under the surface” struck me at once as having unique potential for bringing the Muiopotmos to (fleeting) life.¹⁰ After all, among the challenges of a Moviepotmos! would be the visual adaptation of Spenser’s sardonic mode: pleasure moving inexorably towards the pain that pleasure prefigures, as well as flickering intimations of disaster infiltrating even the most edenic spaces, yet all of it still whimsical, fun (because this is a bug poem, not Paradise Lost). Most of these intimations, of course, are hidden in the stinging tails of mock-epic similes, as in the comparison of Clarion’s “breastplate” to the doomed Achilles’s glorious but unavailing shield, or in the echoes of Ovid’s Proserpina and Actaeon haunting the inset aetiology of the butterfly’s colorful wings, while others reveal themselves fleetingly in tonal grace-notes like Clarion’s “curious busie eye” or the “franke lustinesse” of his aeronautical style (57–63, 113–44, 171, 148).

Because it adapts only the herb-garden stanzas of Muiopotmos, our pilot risks the mere reproduction of the pleasure the insouciant Clarion finds among his favorite flowers, without the flashes of danger and predictable pain essential to Spenser’s sardonic mode. But Claire has incorporated the latter without sacrificing the former; witness the parallel close-ups of Clarion on white flowers: first the “Daysies decking prime,” then the “breathfull Camomill” (192, 195). In the latter case, the butterfly’s spasmodic leg wiggle after his indulgent slurp of chamomile nectar confirms his tiny but intense pleasure, but our vanishingly brief vision, during his daisy dinner, of play-jewels and sequins adorning (informing?) Clarion’s wings and body are only one part decoration, three parts intimation of a mortal creature’s fragility and ephemerality.

Importing Aragnoll from a later stanza into the pilot to stalk Clarion is of course a more obvious move, maybe even heavy-handed (I was the one pushing for his inclusion), but Claire thoughtfully and profitably incorporates the spider by situating him underneath “Dull Poppy,” the flower closest to death in this garden. The following image of Clarion’s mesmerized bug-eyes—updating and upgrading Spenser’s adjective “Dull”—unites pleasure and menace in a precisely sardonic way: the clownish Clarion drugging himself at the worst possible moment, in the lurking presence of the diabolical. Claire achieves this balance yet again in her artwork for the spider, who in his brief surreptitious cameos (watch to the end for a teaser of the full Moviepotmos!) strikes the perfect balance between cute Halloween decor and the portrait of an assassin more than capable of slaughtering a beautiful, innocent butterfly.

All along, Claire has been quite gracious in fending off my unsolicited PowerPoints featuring Achilles arming on ancient Greek vases, the usual excerpts from Ovid, Titian’s Rape of Europa, and pages from Gerard’s Herball (these last, at least, proved helpful when she was designing her eye-candy paper herbs and flowers, especially that narcolepidopteric poppy). Well aware of my own tin ear, though, I could hardly pretend to guide Spencer on his musical journey into Clarion’s little world, beyond our mutual agreement that Thomas Tallis is of course marvelous and that it’s probably easier to write bee-music than butterfly-music. Free of my meddling, Spencer volunteered the ideas of a “miniature” music to suit “a poem of miniatures,” of “taking four-part harmony and the entire sonic range, and condensing them onto an instrument one person can play.”¹¹ Producing alternative versions of a soundtrack for Claire’s film—one predominantly ambient, the other incorporating “some altered guitar stuff”—we opted for the latter, because (as Spencer phrased it), “The guitar is… a perfect ‘miniature’ instrument, as a further reduction of the condensed orchestra of the piano.” That indeed sounds Spenserian to me; the sonic equivalent of reducing the nine-line Spenserian stanza, with its Alexandrine excess, to a classically iambic, perfectly rhymed ottava rima.

When Claire and I asked Spencer for some examples of where his mind was going while reading and discussing Muiopotmos, he opened us up to “70s avant garde animations like Asparagus (Susan Pitt), Fantastic Planet, and visionary synth pioneers like Wendy Carlos, Suzanne Ciani, and Isao Tomita.” Listening to these in my car, I was trying to imagine what sort of music Edmund Spenser would be into nowadays, and soon decided that Tomita’s ambient rendition of Clair de Lune or the 1973 soundtrack to Fantastic Planet, with its Britomart-drops-acid vibe, indeed sounded more plausible than, say, Bad Bunny or Taylor Swift. Spenser (with an s) was, after all, an avant-garde experimentalist when it came to form, but famously retrospective in his language; Spencer (with a c) adapts him best by combining the here and now (e.g., Ciani’s 2024 Quidriphonic Ellipses) with the there and then (Pitt’s 1979 Asparagus), to create a new sound that is, well, Spencerian.

However ill-equipped I am to adequately describe Spencer’s musical genealogy and adaptive technique, what is perfectly clear is the rich detail and precise timing of his soundtrack for Moviepotmos!. The opening chord, delayed until the last second of the initial frame (the text of stanza 24), unites excitement with menace, but Clarion’s first trip to the marigold, with its hints of relaxing sitar, may disarm the listener with the vicarious pleasure of watching a butterfly sample flowers. Once again, however, the visit to the daisy turns ever so slightly ominous, when a faint electricity joins the music just as Claire’s ghostly sequins flicker across the butterfly. Two or three discordant notes while Clarion perches atop the chamomile might just be my pessimistic imagination, but the soundscape shifts to Twilight Zone territory as soon as we arrive at the poppy, and now the butterfly is unmistakably in danger. His narcotic daze, merely mysterious for a few seconds, turns into nightmare at precisely the one-minute mark, as Spencer renders what Claire and I had called the “fun butterfly sound” in an earlier draft into the aural hallucination of a bad trip. Although the music seemingly grows kinder to Clarion as he approaches and alights upon “refreshing Rosmarine,” an uncomfortable, frenetic whine during the close-up of his caffeinated eyes leaves us with the impression of an unstable and vulnerable protagonist (200). The music thus captures and exposes what the poem hides, for in shrinking The Faerie Queene’s Wandering Wood down to Clarion’s “gay gardins,” Spenser had replaced the instructive hollowness of “the Maple seeldom inward sound” with the insignificant (and therefore lethally dangerous) “refreshing Rosmarine” (FQ 1.1.9.9, Muio. 200).

Et voilà ici: an artist named Claire has reinvigorated Spenser’s Clarion and a musician named Spencer has unmuted Muiopotmos. It’s true I’m a very interested party, but I can’t wait for the complete film: Clarion arming himself with flimsy but glorious paper and tinsel, the raging-goddess-v.-envious-spider music of the weaving contest, and so much more.