The Lovers
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November 12, 2023
"An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion." Charles Baudelaire
Les Fleurs du Mal is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire written from 1840 until 1867. At that time the poems were extremely controversial due to their themes of decadence and eroticism. Today we would interpret them differently.
Regal Tail
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"Fleurs du Mal" is an exhibition of drawings by Kathleen Cammarata accompanied by an ekphrasis poetry reading by Catherine Marenghi and Janet McAdams based on Baudelaire's quote.
Cammarata has created sixteen colored pencil drawings with a sense of beauty as well as a sense of surrealism. Each illustration plays with the relationship between realistic plants and invented botany. The drawings harbor hidden caterpillars, lurking bugs, and an occasional snake. In the piece titled "Fleurs: The Contessa" a mauve banana blossom wears her green ovaries like a crown as a pale purple serpent winds its way behind her.
The Bard
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Ekphrasis has been defined as the "verbal representation of visual representation." In this case, McAdams and Marenghi will present new poems inspired by drawings in Cammarata's "Fleurs du Mal" series. McAdams will read poems inspired by three drawings in the series titled Crown, Queen and The Regal Tail.
Marenghi will share three poems inspired by Duchess, The Lovers, and The Bard.
Queen
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Fleurs du Mal
Art by Kathleen Cammarata
inspiring the poetry of
Janet McAdams and Catherine Marenghi
Sun, Nov 19: Art Opening 1-4pm, Poetry Reading 2pm
Alameda 6, Colonia San Antonio
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Janet McAdams is a writer, editor, and translator. Her first book, The Island of Lost Luggage
, received an American Book Award. Her other poetry collections include Feral
, the chapbook Seven Boxes for the Country After
, and Buffalo in Six Directions / Búfalo en seis direciones
, a bilingual edition of her new and selected poems, recently published in Mexico City and Patagonia.
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Catherine Marenghi is an award-winning poet, novelist and memoirist based in San Miguel. Her books include Unfurled: Love Poems
(2023), historical novel Our Good Name
(2022), Breaking Bread: Poems
(2020), and Glad Farm: A Memoir
(2016). Her poetry has been published in literary journals in the U.S., Mexico, India, and Canada, and other countries. She is very active in the literary community of San Miguel and, with poet Judyth Hill, co-founded the Poetry Mesa, an international poetry community.
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Kathleen Cammarata is an artist working for forty years. She has had more than twenty solo shows and now exhibits her work mostly in her studio in San Miguel. She has taught in two museums and in a university in Massachusetts. Her works are in collections in the States, Canada, and Mexico.
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