Michelangelo's Seizure

by Steve Gehrke

Providing poetic entry into the visual arts In Michelangelo's Seizure, Steve Gehrke seizes the lives of several classic and contemporary painters--from Caravaggio and Magritte to Francis Bacon and Jackson Pollock--to demonstrate how these artists transformed physical, psychological, and political suffering into art. Mirroring the brushstrokes in long, metaphor-laden sentences, Gehrke moves freely through the canvas, into and out of the artists' lives, into the public realm, into history, to capture the way the creative mind can transform even the most violent surroundings--a prison cell, a battlefield, a madhouse--into a masterpiece

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can see why T.R. Hummer chose this book for the National Poetry Series--these ekphrastic poems, with their aggressive music and haunting images, just don't capture a painting, but capture the artists at work and history--both the personal history of the artists, and the greater history of us.

[Akaash Krishnan · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow ok holy sh*t that was a spiritual experience. did i create a slideshow of the supplementary source paintings? did i queue a dark academia playlist? did these choices color my reading? all great questions ! lol anyway this was mad gay. homoerotic as heck. the robert mapplethorpe tease and queer-coded, war-torn strife prose were my personal faves.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truth be told, I feel that most ekphrastic poetry are exercise poems, or assignment poems. Something that is either about conforming to this piece of art, or indulging some lyric thought that must, by the poet's rules, be limited and tethered to that art. This said, I'm not sure why Gehrke has framed these poems as ekphrastic poems. They're good. They're indulgent. They're psychologically probing. They won't release their sentences for any rest, because there always needs to be more to say. And what's said feels so necessary. So, why, then, are these all attached to pieces of art, or artists? I would have liked to see some other principle connecting these poems together.

[Georgia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is brought up often among circles of people who like and write art based poetry but I wasn't really happy with the book. I just wasn't drawn into the narratives the the author creates.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gehrke is the king of metaphors. Very engaging, but was so much that I needed to take a break from reading the poems. But when I returned, I again enjoyed it until I felt saturated. Worth reading.