Gerald Fleming
Gerald Fleming
Gerald Fleming’s most recent book is The Bastard and the Bishop, prose poems (Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn). Earlier books are One, an experiment in monosyllabic prose poems (also Hanging Loose), The Choreographer, longer prose poems (Sixteen Rivers), Night of Pure Breathing, prose poems (Hanging Loose), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers). Fleming taught in San Francisco’s public schools for thirty-seven years and has written a few books for teachers. Between 1995-2000 he edited and published the literary magazine Barnabe Mountain Review, later edited the epistolary magazine Forward to Velma, and has just completed editing One (More) Glass, a limited-edition, limited duration magazine on glass. In 2021, Sixteen Rivers published the expansive Collected Poetry and Prose of Lawrence Fixel, which Fleming edited. He and his wife lived in Lagunitas for 46 years, and have recently moved to a home in San Rafael. His work has appeared widely in magazines, anthologies, and online.
The Choreographer (2013)
“All through The Choreographer, we encounter our own humanness in mirrors both dark and bright, as Gerald Fleming reveals us to ourselves. Each of these pieces feels unexpected yet somehow inevitable. I love their mordant wit, their sparseness and precision, their relentless truthfulness. This book is filled with music, and Fleming’s lyrical mastery is nowhere clearer than in the stunning sequence at its center—prose poems sprung from fifteenth-century Sephardic songs that seduce us into his imagined world of irresolvable ache, foolishness, and joy.” —Joan Larkin, author of My Body: New and Selected Poems.
Listen to Gerald read the title poem of The Choreographer .
Gerald’s book The Choreographer was reviewed by Deborah Bogen, in the Winter 2014 volume of Gently Read Literature.
Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (2005)
“Fleming gifts us with a rare generosity, revealing the ‘extra’ in the so-called ‘ordinary’ experiences of travel, friendship, and family ties in our daily lives. In a voice of condensed, colloquial intimacy sobered by awareness of the world’s menace and acknowledging the irrational in himself, he reaches a high compassionate humor as he infuses his exploration with the surprising pleasure of sudden discovery. As he himself says, ‘It has to do with joy.’ ” —Jack Marshall, author of Gorgeous Chaos: New & Selected Poems, 1965-2001
Read poems from Swimmer Climbing onto Shore by Gerald Fleming.
Michael Dennis reviews One, Gerald’s newest book from Hanging Loose Press.
Read Gerald’s new work in Mudlark No. 5
Watch video of Gerald reading at Petaluma Poetry Walk, Jungle Vibes, Sun. 9/18/11.
Gerald’s poem “Bone & Silence” is archived on the website poets.org of the Academy of American Poets.
Gerald’s poem “Long Marriage” was featured in American Life in Poetry, column 208.