Gerald Fleming: California Poets Part 9, Four Poems

Gerald Fleming

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Gerald Fleming

Four Poems

Linda

“She didn’t want her, & when I reached out & took her & asked what name she said Whose name? & I said the baby—the baby’s name—& she said Oh, I thought you meant mine & it was clear she was a woman without antecedent then I thought she said Linda, & I said Linda? & she said No, I said LinDA, LinDA, then turned away as if in dismissal of the grace of this child I held in the crook of my arm, who looked at me now, the mother striding up the hill & away & now the child was mine as in a sense she’d always been mine & she knew it & I knew it & each year then I put money away for the day—I could have named the day, there by the cyclone fence—that the mother would return & ask for her & show the license of her DNA, the slick card of her attorney—and I was ready, I’d saved, I’d practiced a law of my own, a law of enfoldment, articulation, attention, & in the end it was my daughter who saved me, money unnecessary, for she was fluent not just in the Latin of her beautyname but in the language—surprising, forceful, empty of vitriol—of repudiation.”

The Usher Explains

“Anyway it was that part where the church-man says Does anybody see any reason—and Jeanine’s sittin’ over there on the side all low-cut—quiet for a change, blowin’ her nose into this big purple rag & the guy says it again like he Knows Something & Jeanine giggles & Stanley’s standin’ next to me there in back, Stan laughs, slugs me in the arm, Stop, I say, & he does it again like when we were kids, but this one went right to the bone, hurt like hell, I mean I TOLD him stop, so I just clock him one, his head snaps back & that black tooth gets all stuck in his bottom lip & he takes me by surprise, dives at my knees—this bump here, it’s where my head hit the pew—& we’re rollin’ around & all right I admit, I’ve got a tendency to bite & sometimes spit, but now this was evil, he’s got his knee right on my jewels, his hand on my Adam’s apple & I guess I aimed bad & my spit hit some guy from Q.P. Doll’s people—that’s what Stan calls her, Queen Priscilla for the way she orders Byron around, Q.P. for short, everyone on our side calls her that, but anyway that Q.P. dude gets all pissed off & jumps in & you know how it all goes so fast & now he’s on me pounding but most of the time missing & I’m almost up, but now Stan’s yanks me by the belt & you better ask someone else for sure, I don’t know I was pretty busy & like I take one breath & here comes Clarence, Mr. Best Man himself all the way from the altar & now it’s three brothers & one stranger, Clare-boy, he gets Stan by the hair slams his head into mine & now the other guy’s on Clare, random that way, but Stan, he didn’t deserve it—I think Clare, he’d been long time waitin’ to get at Stan, and this was an Opportunity, you see, he found his Opportunity, & I look up, catch a glance of Jeanine, she’s off to the side with this crazy-ass grin on her face & here comes Mr. Byron Bridegroom right down off the altar-kneeler thing & Stop! Goddamn, you guys, he keeps saying, Goddamn & tryin’ to pull us apart, then Don’t you USE our Lord’s name in vain, Boy, some old dude at the side says, & anyway Byron’s all in now, he’s got Clare in a nelson, all of us brothers in, just like the old days—Byron always had Clare in that nelson, you’d think Clare’d learn, and I know the whole thing was ugly, and I know some guests took a bit of blood and that other gal ruined her dress, but still & all there was a good Family Feeling there, in all that hurt I knew nothing could break us up, not even little Q.P. Doll standing there kickin’ any guy she could—even Byron, she’s even kickin’ Byron, her Husband to Be—& all the time saying You Fucks, You Fucking Fucks, in her wedding dress—that was the funny part, even after we quit, even after people left, Little Q.P. Doll saying You Fucks—kickin’ us with her little white shoes, oh that took the cake, I laughed, we all laughed except Q.P. Doll and that old guy from the other side—her dad, I guess he was. Then they left, too.

“She knew what she was in for, interfering with this family. She knew.”

On Boredom

Once he claimed the concept of boredom impossible, then one afternoon it came. He was in an apartment in Brussels, had money in his pocket, could hear notes of good jazz rising from a little club downstairs—he should go—but the feeling arrived like the moment one takes off one’s clothes and crawls into bed after a long, insulting day. A sense of being hollowed, the surrounding shell of skin having served only to mock his existence—his skull, too, a shell—pocked, every orifice of it explored by the breeze through the window, nothing at all within. The feeling stayed with him, bore down, all the outside world emptying—the newly cleaned Enlightenment statues in the wooded square below holding nothing for him, empty in their bronze skins.

            Then—remember the suddenness of that load of snow falling onto a man’s failing fire in the old short story?—it happened. The desk at which he was sitting had a long line of books at the back, next to the wall. Tall yellow ones, short brown ones, one called Reversing the Spell, a cracked blue spine that said Neruda, the variety of heights & shapes & colors, the potential of their contents perhaps interesting at another time, but not now, then WHOMP—all at once they sloughed left, the red dictionary at the end falling to the floor startlingly, the books still on the desk beautiful in their newly-stable thirty-degree configuration.

            He knew he’d been visited by an angel, pulled from an abyss that, though it had lasted perhaps not five minutes, though it had affected no one else, not even his wife in the next room—was precipitous, threatening.

            It was with a sense of gratitude, then, that he picked up the dictionary, straightened the books, and rearranged them—by size this time, so that they wouldn’t fall again.

Memoirist

            A man in his seventies decided it was time to write his memoir.

            Every day for a year he wrote. By June 600 pages, by the end of December—fall and winter having had an attenuating effect—a thousand, and finished.

            Half the things he said in his book were lies. Said he walked through a forest fire on Mount Vision, and because he’d just swum in a lake, was saved. Said he’d made a scholarly study of turnips, then parsnips, then carrots/potatoes/rutabagas, and only when he could sing by heart the family/genus/species for all—in rhyming couplets he’d devised—did he feel entitled to make a stew. Said he once worked on a Portuguese fishing boat and on its way out of the harbor at Cascais it shattered to splinters on a reef and he clung to the shattered bow until a retired Senegalese Coast Guardsman swam out, saved him.

            Said he had some of the years confused, that he hoped “the reader” would forgive him.

            Said he had a starring role in a lost play of Aristophanes, that he was a descendant of Blaise Pascal, whose anti-Semitism did not pass down to him, that Obama once referred to him as the common man from whom he most often sought advice, that for a period of two years he powered his kitchen lights with dry ice.

            He typed it up, repaired his hairline/double chin/cross-eyes in Photoshop, bought an ISBN, sent the book to an on-demand printer, and two weeks later got two books back. One for the local library, one for him.

            I know nobody, nobody knows me—who’s to say I wasn’t this? he inscribed on his own title page. Who’s to know who I was or wasn’t kissing? A lie’s just a life, one letter gone missing.

Interview

February 11th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Gerald Fleming, Poet, Editor

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Let’s start with your editorial activities, which, in the past, have ranged from magazines to a book of collected poetry/prose by Lawrence Fixel. Could you talk a bit about these endeavors and how your editing approaches differed for each project?

GF: David, my editing projects have been rather ad hoc, depending on odd proclivities at the time. From 1995-2000 I ran a magazine called Barnabe Mountain Review, named for the mountain under which we were living. It was intended to be a five-year project, and I stuck with that, thinking I’d probably be a little burned out if the labor was what I assumed it’d be.

The magazine was print, of course, an annual, averaged 250 or so pages, featured artwork, and ran the work of around 200 writers; four-color covers, etc. I was ready to quit by the end of the five years (end of the century) and did. I loved that project, and looking back at its index now am happy to have published lots of strong work—work that still holds up today.

My approach in Barnabe was selfish: I just wanted publish work that I loved, no form/content/sensibility unallowed. Friends whose work I loved, yes, but for the most part work that came my way via mail (Imagine that! Poetry sent via postal mail!). Basic email existed, of course, and much correspondence with writers was done that way, but the poems/stories/essays came in on paper, and I accepted work that moved me, whoever wrote it. And in the end, in choosing work that resonated, I ended up somehow publishing almost an exactly equal number of women and men. That wasn’t intentional. It just happened.

Another editing project was one that I might resurrect for another single issue. It was a “magazine” (ISSN number, etc.) that ran only once. Forward to Velma was its title, and it featured only letters: an “epistolary” magazine by invitation only—writers I knew at that moment, writers whose work I respected. Not much “editing” was involved, in the sense that each writer submitted a letter of almost any sort: to a fictional character, to a politician, to a mythical figure, to anyone of their choosing (except to me). Writers were in charge of their own editing; mistakes, intentional or not, would be included, as the very letter they submitted would be photocopied and distributed in that form when the magazine came out. I forget how many writers were in there: maybe fifty? And the letters, printed on five or six alternating colors of paper and collated, were sent off in a big fat accordion folder. It was an expensive project. I don’t know why I did it. Just fun, and the letters, sometimes in the form of poems, were delightful, often light-hearted, sometimes quite dark. My approach here differed from that of Barnabe. I took what people sent me (one each), but I knew the people and knew they’d send compelling work.

(I say I might resurrect that project because the woman at the Library of Congress who issued me the ISSN said, long ago, “Please don’t just do one issue of this. Otherwise I shouldn’t have given you this ISSN number.” I promised, and like to keep my promises.)

The next editing project was a collaboration with my brother and sister, Bernie Fleming and Michaela Fleming. They’re glass artists, and we had this idea that we’d print & illustrate single poems on sheets of glass, the words fused into the glass along with illustrations, a process that had never been done before. (That mag, too—broadsides, really—had an ISSN number.) I think we did fifteen or so of those, and they, too, were by invitation—some by local pals and some by pals in Paris. Poets would send me a number of poems and I’d choose one, pass it on to Bernie and Michaela, and they’d take it from there. These things are beautiful: each poet got one, we ourselves got one, and a few were left over. I sent a whole set to the Library of Congress, as required, made the mistake of sending it via the post office rather than UPS (cheapskate!), and they never arrived. Lost. Gone. I still have a couple of complete sets, and hope one day soon to do a little gallery show celebrating the work not only of the poets, but, deeply, the prodigious work my brother and sister did on the project. My regrets on that project are primarily that the process was so complex and time-consuming (not on my part—I just chose the poems) that, while it would have been great to reach out to more writer friends, I just couldn’t ask my brother and sister to do yet more.

Finally, the Lawrence Fixel project, which culminated in the publication of The Collected Poetry and Prose of Lawrence Fixel (Sixteen Rivers Press, San Francisco, 2020, 571pp.), was a massive effort that spanned sixteen years. That editing job involved collecting the writings of that widely published avant-garde poet (primarily prose poet) and dear friend, keeping my promise to him and his wife (the Jungian therapist Justine Jones Fixel, an early pioneer of sand play therapy), to get it out into the world. The project was complex; I could go into much detail here but won’t: let’s just say that it had many tentacles, involved a few essential helpers (the poets Christina Fisher and Sharon Coleman among them), and was also aided by supportive essays solicited from a good number of poets and editors. That project overwhelmed me in its scope, but I’m a tenacious bastard, and its product—the book itself—is something Fixel would have been proud of. (If any readers of this interview, particularly prose poets, are not familiar with Fixel’s seminal work, I urge them to get to know it.) (And a warning to writers reading this: think twice before you say Yes when a prolific and widely respected writer—even someone you love—asks you to be their literary executor.)

DG: For 37 years, you taught in the public schools of San Francisco and have even written books for teachers. To what extent were teaching and writing complementary acts and what did you enjoy most about being in the class?

GF: For the first dozen or so years I taught young kids in the San Francisco Public Schools—was writing and publishing (mostly magazines) at the same time, but felt the two endeavors unrelated—two different lives, in a sense. For the other twenty-five or so years I taught middle school, also in San Francisco, and few of my students or colleagues knew that I was steadily writing/publishing work. It wasn’t exactly that I wanted to be secretive, but I did want to be low-key, keep the two worlds separate.

In looking back, I’ve seen that the two (writing and teaching public school) were not at all separate or asymmetrical, and could be thought of as complementary. Teaching kept me honest, I think—day-to-day immersion in city kids’ lives, the necessity in teaching of breaking ideas down to their essence and being able to articulate/expand them in an accessible way, a human way, and, importantly, avoid egotism, ivory-towerism. Teenagers will call you out for any bullshit, any hint of dishonesty, any pretense. And because of that, I was able to exist in that world and in my parallel writing world unaffected, in a way, by the ambitions of academia or the imitation/envy/soap operatics that friends encountered there. I got lucky teaching in the public schools. It was a great gift. I loved the job, and am still in contact with many former students, have been able to follow their lives. Great joy there.

The teaching books I wrote, or co-wrote, were mostly about getting kids to write, and write well, in the classroom.

You asked also about what I enjoyed most about being in class—a really interesting question.

Teaching middle school is tough, no matter what school, no matter where. Five or six classes a day, fifty minutes each, thirty or so kids per class, five days a week. One group walks out and another walks in. Kids at all levels of skill, all levels of emotional & physical development. It’s kind of wild that way, the gestalt of it, but even the hard days were enjoyable for me: perhaps because they were hard. On the good days (which were most of them), there were times when things were clicking so well, when kids were so alive with ideas and hungry for learning and astonishingly insightful, funny, world-aware, generous, that I felt as if I was flying, it was so much fun. I guess the only thing I can compare it with is being in the audience of a symphony or jazz group when the music just takes you away, takes you out of time. In that metaphor I wonder if it’s actually like being conductor, but it’s not that: it’s as if you begin that way and the kids take off on their own, and you’re guiding it occasionally, riding it, and the kids feel it, too, and soon the period’s over, and as a teacher you again face the reality of time—our notion of it—and off the kids go, to P.E. or something.

I could go on about this, but will stop.

DG: The pieces you have in California Poets Part 9 are a set of four prose poems, yet you’ve also written along more traditional verse parameters. Does the subject matter decide the form or are there other considerations?

GF: David, for the past few decades I’ve tended immediately to go to the prose form. I suppose it’s a habit I should break. My first prose poem was published I think in 1974. It felt liberating. My first book, though, was a book of lineated poems, most of which I’m still happy enough with. But it’s a rare thing that I begin with “verse” these days though that does occur, and when it does, I don’t understand it. It’s as if the poem says Don’t you dare block me in prose, and announces its own line breaks. Some of those poems I’ve tried later to force into prose, and they resist, kicking and screaming the whole time.

They always win.

I haven’t thought about subject matter as determining what form the poem takes. Maybe it has something to do with a desire for terseness vs. amplitude. But that doesn’t feel correct: some of the best prose poems are tight, terse… impactful that way. And so many “verse” poems are range-y things, discursive, etc.

DG: Returning to Lawrence Fixel, who was well-known for his prose poems, how did you discover his work and are there other poets in that style you admire?

GF: There are writers who guard their friendships with other writers and writers who share friendships freely, connecting, as in “You two should know each other!” One of the latter was the Santa Cruz poet Morton Marcus, with whom I became friends as I was publishing Barnabe. Mort insisted that I meet Larry Fixel, who lived in San Francisco. This must have been 1995. Larry and I became friends, I published his work, and through Larry (he was another of those writers of generous spirit) I met so many others: Ed Mycue, Carl Rakosi, Jim Schevill, Lennart Bruce, Jack Marshall (oh, wait, I met Jack through Mort , too, though he and Larry were dear friends), lots of others.

Fixel and I had lots in common literarily. He wrote prose poems and modern parables (verse poems earlier), our sensibilities were similar (irresolution important in our work, mirroring such in human life, etc.) And we liked each other, deeply enjoyed each other’s company. And Larry’s wife Justine was a joy to talk with/ruminate with.

As we grew closer, Larry asked me to be his literary executor. Once in a while I’d ask him what he had in mind, and he’d say, “Oh, let’s talk about that in good time.” Before we had a chance to discuss it at length, he keeled over in his living room one morning, died on the spot. The rest of the evolution of that project is explained in my intro to the Collected. Sixteen Rivers Press was wonderful in giving me great latitude in the endeavor, and I’ll be forever grateful for that, and for how beautifully—physically —the book came out. I was able to include the wonderful photographer Mark Citret’s portraits, and thumbnails of the spectacular painter Stephanie Dante Sanchez’s work throughout. Both of them were dear friends of the Fixels, and that integration felt right.

As to other poets in that style that I admire, I get overwhelmed thinking of that. Borges, of course, Neruda, Vallejo, Edson, the old French poets (I just now murdered a mosquito with a Reverdy book, so I love him all the more), Simic, some of Bly, and so many contemporaries: my friend Peter Johnson, who ran The Prose Poem magazine years ago, his work, and it's Peter, partly, who has turned me on to so many people doing amazing things—Denise Duhamel, among others. And of course the Californian Maxine Chernoff. I want to mention so many friends here, but there’d be dozens of them, and even at that I’d embarrass myself to myself in neglecting to mention some. But I do want to mention, for those interested in the prose poem as a genre, the Australians Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington, whose work in the form—its history, and their own practice—has been seminal. They’ve done deep study, lifelong, and their work should be considered essential in any university prose poem syllabus.

DG: The late Cathy Colman, whose tribute reading happened at Beyond Baroque just over a month, was a dear friend, and her poems, along with an interview, also appear in California Poets Part 7. Could speak a bit about this friendship, how you met, and how her work influenced your own?

GF: Cathy and I met at San Francisco State in graduate school. I think we first met in a poetry class taught by Stan Rice, the novelist Anne Rice’s husband and a spectacular poet and painter. I almost called it “a poetry intensive,” for that’s what Stan’s classes were: deep dives into the “core and the pith” of it, as Roethke would have it. After that class we probably took one or two classes together too but, more importantly, Cathy and I and some other poets—most of whom are no longer with us—were part of a writing group that was essential to our own development. Cath moved around a bit, left the group (this was before Zoom, which has made the far-flung possible), and settled, as you know, in L.A., and ultimately sadly, for reasons we all know, in Pacific Palisades. She was one of those people in our lives who, though we don’t see them often, we still speak with/exchange letters with (in our case sometimes including poems) and feel close with all our lives. Bonds formed in poetry, which is honest at its core if it’s any good.

Cath’s poetry never lost its edge. I’d urge any reader to get any of her books, and they’d see. She took chances with language, brooked no bullshit in literature or life, had a great sense of humor (a great sense of human), suffered mightily with physical problems, and is deeply missed by anyone who knew her. I am certain that her poetry will live on, and I wish she did.

DG: You spend part of the year living in San Francisco and part of it in Paris. What are things, both literary and non-literary, you love about the former city and how does spending time in the latter influence both your personal and creative outlook?

GF: I grew up in San Francisco (my wife might challenge that “grew up” phrase!), went to school there, we had our first child there, taught in S.F. for my entire career, but for forty-some years I lived in West Marin, a semi-rural village called Lagunitas. (Do you know Bob Hass’s poem “Meditation in Lagunitas”? That’s the place.) Right now we’re living in San Rafael, about twenty minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Our family lived in the fog in San Francisco, the Avenues. Foggier in the fifties and sixties than it is now: climate change. When I think back, I see that the solitude fog brings helped shape me. Funny to think of something so amorphous shaping, but great memories of walking home from school enveloped in it, lots of time to think. Fog creates a privacy, an invitation to be slow. A great comfort there. (My friend the [late] poet Peter Kunz, who came from New Mexico to attend S.F. State’s writing program, rented a place in the Avenues and used to say, “It’s so goddamn foggy in the Avenues that when the sun comes out the dogs bark at it!”) Fog allowed me to think about contradictions (Catholicism, family life), moved me toward self.

So much more to talk about on San Francisco, its richness, but… will just say that the accident of getting into S.F. State’s wonderful writing program in the sixties and seventies, those rich years, made all the difference in my life. I was drifting, but found great teachers, talented and passionate fellow students, that thirst for knowledge that we’ve all encountered. The writing scene was intense: Kathleen Fraser was head of the renowned Poetry Center (after Mark Linenthal) and put together some astonishing readings (though she later said she did regret putting Bukowski and Stafford on the same bill, Bukowski swigging from his bottles of vodka & o.j., playing to his groupies, and Stafford delivering his measured Quaker-esque poems, unflappable as always...) Those were days of Ginsberg readings, Duncan, Rich, Kizer, Rexroth, Levertov, McClure, Creeley, Civ Cedering, R. Hugo, Tranströmer, Bly, Oppen, Wagoner, Angelou, Rukeyser, Snyder, Baraka, Grahn, James Dickey, Murguia, Waldman, many others, often mega-readings in large auditoriums—even Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Friends who read this will surely remind me of others. I think Brodsky read (no friend of Yevtushenko, that’s for sure).

As to Paris, I’m spending a little less time there lately—the birth of grandkids has often had us wanting to be in Oregon, where they live—but Paris is essential to me in ways I don’t understand: not just its history, my own history with it, not just its literature, civility, culture, but also the contemporary: the city’s dogged determination to make itself livable, to fight climate change in very real ways, to remake itself as Paris has done since… Clovis? People still read there. (Although I must say that when we first bought our small apartment there [co-owned with my brother and sister-in-law] twenty-three years ago, people on the Metro read books. Now they’re staring at phones. Maybe reading books on the phone? One can hope...)

People discuss matters civilly there. They look at each other. And they’re educated. This might sound elitist to say, but it’s true: even those who never attended university in France have a level of general knowledge often above that of Americans who have graduated university.

The lit scene in Paris, too, is rich. Even the expat lit scene. Good magazines, lots of readings. I have some dear friends there, writer friends whose work I love. I do a lot of writing when I’m there: partly because I’m somewhere else, somewhere the porch doesn’t need rebuilding or the gutters don’t need clearing, etc., but also because there are so many great (and ornate) libraries to spend time in, so much unappropriated time to stretch out rhetorically, read deeply, float in that.

DG: Jazz music has been a constant influence. What is it about the genre that appeals to you, who are your go-to artists, and do you ever listen to them while writing?

GF: We were talking about Paris, so I should mention Paris here in relation to jazz. When we first got the place in Paris twenty-three years ago, we were lucky enough to become friends with Barney Kirchhoff, an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and a multi-decade expat there. Barney’s no longer with us, but, because of his passion for jazz, he turned us on to so much going on there. We went to dozens of jazz performances with him—small clubs, mostly—and his knowledge of jazz was encyclopedic, though you wouldn’t know that unless you spent hours with him.

I loved jazz before those days in Paris, for sure—Bill Evans, Miles, of course, Art Blakey, the usual greats. But hanging with Barney for those many years made me appreciate not only the (continuing, but, alas, diminishing) jazz scene in Paris, but also, in a way that I hadn’t seen, the day-to-day jazz musicians in clubs all across the city whose work never “goes platinum,” but who are terrific, dedicated to their art, late nights/small clubs/day jobs to go to… there for the communion with like-minded sisters and brothers. I think of a pianist named Laurent Epstein and the great drummer Julie Saury, both of whom tend to stay in Paris and play gigs there, sometimes large, but mostly small.

To name big names important to me, though, again overwhelms.

EvansDavisMethenyParkerColtraneCharlapHartmanHaydenGillespieDolphyBechetJeffersonRoachVaughanDjangoJarrettCoreaM.L.WilliamsMingusJAlexanderBCarterRCarter … my god, what inexhaustible wealth we have …

As to whether I listen to music while I write: no. Never. I need quiet, need to hear myself talking to myself for the music of the poems themselves.

DG: One of the key aspects in your work—and something which features in an especially strong way in Night of Pure Breathing—is your ability to mix wit with often dark, serious themes. Do you use humor as a survival mechanism, or, instead, as a means to communicate something controversial people could otherwise not say seriously?

GF: I’m of Irish heritage, and of course we live on dark humor. The first thing I go for in the Sunday paper is “The Irish Sporting Green,” i.e. the obits. That’s just in the DNA. And the “dark, serious themes,” as you call them (yes to that) would destroy us if we didn’t sometimes see the absurdity in such, the ultimate ridiculousness—we piddly humans struggling to assign meaning—either overarching or temporary—to our existence (far more stars in the universe than grains of sand on every beach in the world, etc., and if the multiverse is proven, then…) You know what I mean. So I suppose you could say that it’s a survival mechanism, but the mechanism itself is Rube-Goldbergian, often a delight to behold, and can yield belly-laughs even in bad news. (Takes a couple of days, that, but…)

As to communicating something controversial people could otherwise not say seriously, I’m not sure about that, exactly what it means, but in any case I’d vote for the saying of it (the controversial) and getting it out into the world of discourse, rhetorical or otherwise.

I should mention, though, that not all of my poems that have serious topics have absurdist undertones. If my work is regarded as generally “comic,” I’d think of my life as a poet a failure. I’ve written and published many, many poems not wry or absurdist at all—just the facts or the scene laid out for the reader to see/regard as he or she wishes. Some poems having to do with child abuse come to mind, some war poems as well.

(I was once doing a reading for a new book—I forget which—and a friend told me that she was sitting next to someone she didn’t know, and that person, mid-reading, leaned over to her and said, “This guy scares me!” My friend knows me pretty well, and we both had such a good laugh at that. But in a way, that comment was edifying: if I can succeed in having people look at stuff—dark matter, if you wish—I’m happy with that. What they do with it, that’s for them to choose.

DG: In your collection, One, you experimented with monosyllabic poems. What was the impetus behind the project and what were the rewards/challenges you faced writing it?

GF: Some years ago my buddy Murray Silverstein was going down to L.A. to attend a writing workshop. He asked if I wanted to come. I don’t usually go to those things, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to spend a few days with him, so I signed up and went. The magnificent poet Terrence Hayes was doing a workshop; I signed up for it. One of Hayes’s assignments was to come back the next day with something “measured”—however we wanted to define it. As I was walking across the campus, I focused on my steps: one, one, one, and thought it’d be interesting to write something in monosyllabics. I did that—a decent poem, but not very good—and I guess from that point, and really for the next year or so, I got into kind of a “jag” about monosyllabics, heard them everywhere, wrote that way. At first it was a challenge, then, in a kind of revolt vs. polysyllabics, the writing came pretty naturally, the old hard Anglo-Saxon beats (Brutalist? hmm…), and I found that I was engaged with multiple subject matters. I started sending them out, not mentioning to editors that they were monosyllabic, and they started appearing here & there. Soon I had enough for a book, and Hanging Loose in New York, who’ve published three of my titles, took it, and put out One.

I did find the book rewarding. Had always been charmed, I guess I can say, by those French writers/philosophers/mathematicians engaged in Oulipo, and without intending to be an Oulipian, if there’s such a word, maybe it turned out that way. The deal was sealed when my wife and I were at the Whitney one day, we rounded a corner and there before us was a really crazy painting by John Wilde (“Work Reconsidered # 1”), an ornamented, half-naked human, one finger stuck up in the air. The Wilde family was gracious enough to let Hanging Loose use the image for a cover. I think it’s really funny.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

GF: At this moment, reading a few things: the poet Dante DiStefano, who I think is one of our contemporary best (he lives in upstate New York); an old anthology I somehow hadn’t known and that friends recommended: The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. Also a couple of gift books: Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, and Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive. And just yesterday heard that the collected Larry Levis is out, so will be ordering that. What else: reading the new Hanging Loose magazine (print!) that just came in the mail, its 118th issue. And the new Sixteen Rivers Press books by Moira Magneson and Patrick Cahill and Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong and Ulalume González de León, the translation by Terry Ehret and Nancy Morales. Regularly dipping through Best American Poetry 2025, and not because I have a poem there this year—I always like it, and find the fact that this is its last year pretty tragic—another national blow to poetry, as has been the Post’s decision to cut its Books section, as has the Times’ decision to no longer review poetry, etc. Oh—also just got in the mail Cole Swensen’s translation of Emmanuel Hocquard’s Elegies. Whether in her own work or in translations, Cole is wonderful.

These are days when we most need poetry.

What am I working on? Just finished a new manuscript of prose poems and sent it to a press I love, crossing fingers it’ll be taken. I’m excited about it, thinking it might be my best book. Otherwise have been working on a particular long poem, struggling to get it to come true. Some days it’s my enemy, and I have to step away, do other things like Getting Organized and other futile pursuits.

Thanks for this conversation, David.

Author Bio:

Gerald Fleming’s most recent book is The Bastard and the Bishop (prose poems, Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn). Other titles include One (an experiment in monosyllabic prose poems, also Hanging Loose), The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press, San Francisco), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers). His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies over the decades, most recently in Best American Poetry 2025. Fleming taught for thirty-seven years in San Francisco’s public schools, and he lives most of the year in San Rafael, California.