Words for hard discovery
Last fall, J.K. Fowler, the founder of the small Oakland publisher Nomadic Press, rifled through an upcoming catalog of works during an interview with The Chronicle. He paused on a particular title, expressing incredulity. A book of poems, “Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory,” was the first work that Oakland poet James Cagney had ever had published — to Fowler, a baffling fact about the 50-year-old who has been a prominent voice in the Bay Area poetry scene for years.
But in Cagney’s telling, this late debut was partly deliberate. The book came to be only after the support of the writer’s community around him enabled him to lay himself bare.
“The personal nature of all this stuff — I just kind of gave myself the permission to tell the truth,” Cagney said. “It is very, very scary. It’s weird, because it’s a poetry collection, but as far as I’m concerned, it also counts as an autobiography in a way.”
Cagney is not being abstract about artistic vulnerability. The heart of his book lies in a particular truth revealed decades ago, when he was 19. At the time, Cagney was living in his parents’ house in Oakland, when his mother had friends over on a Sunday afternoon.
His father inexplicably asked Cagney to sit in the living room with his mother’s friends — an older woman and her daughter, along with the daughter’s own two children — during their visit.
“The women and the children then leave,” he recalled. “We all go out on the porch and wish them well and wave as they drive off. As they do that, my father then turns to me and looks at me and says, ‘Do you think you look like either of them?’ ”
It was an absurd question to Cagney when he heard it. Yet it would continue to churn in his head throughout the next day. “I finally come back from school that Monday and sit with my mom and somehow grab the courage based on everything I had been thinking about to ask her: ‘Are you really my mother?’ And that answer she gives me is not what I had expected.”
Cagney was adopted; the older woman who had been over was his birth mother, and the younger woman was one of his sisters. The revelation shook Cagney’s world. In this book, years later, it haunts his poems.
“I felt like my identity was a house of cards that just got knocked over. And another deck of cards was just scattered into and added to it, and I’m just forced to rebuild it,” Cagney said. He references the film “The Truman Show,” in which the protagonist comes to realize his entire life has been built within a staged television show. “It was almost like they all had this inside knowledge and nobody was revealing that to me. I was living a completely different sort of version of my own life from everybody else.”
Throughout “Black Steel Magnolias,” Cagney still appears to be parsing a new reality in poems that are sorrowed and searching. In “I Am Adopted,” he writes, “I am keeper of stories falling under the table/ I am carrier of the virus of memory/ I am adopted —/ Too often my dreams are full of strangers/ & my pockets full of someone else’s keys.”
Poetry serves as a form of therapy for Cagney in a “lifelong process” of reckoning with this kind of truth. “With all of this stuff going on in my heart, I just wanted somebody to hold me,” he said. “I didn’t have anybody to go to for that, so I just kind of wrote all of that stuff out of my system.”
The poems, written throughout the past two decades, are for Cagney’s 19-yearold self, and for others who might have felt similarly lost and alone.
“There are other people in the world who have similar stories or experiences or even worse stories or experiences. To just go in and tell it and share it is kind of like both validating myself and giving permission to others out there that your story does have value, too.”