Jennifer Redmond and I met at the Irish Museum of Modern Art Summer School 2021 and we discovered that we had in common an interest in the poetry of Edmund Spenser. What follows is an account of the research, and our creative responses to that investigation. The work was conducted in 2021 mostly through Zoom online.
For me, it was an intuitive interest that started with the epic poem The Faerie Queene and extended to the author. While Jennifer had come across the personae of the various characters in the poem in her reading, and had stumbled repeatedly upon accounts of the author that fascinated her often in disturbing ways.
We knew that there was something to discover but were repeatedly put off by the sententious tone, the tight brick-like structure, and the unusual dialect of the poem ...We decided to introduce some space into the structure to get at the substance of work; to fragment Spenser’s perspective and to initiate a conversation between the poet and ourselves (although he is dead for hundreds of years). We thought, as two women, to subvert his authorial intention, and to assert our agancy as readers – embedded parasites perhaps, in the poem.
Link to full essay: https://theunbound.info/Spenser-Spin-II