James Cagney Writes Poems to His Teenage Self

Brandon Yu of the San Francisco Chronicle introduces Bay Area readers to Oakland's own James Cagney and J.K. Fowler in advance of James Cagney's reading from his debut poetry collection, Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory (published by Fowler's Nomadic Press), at the Berkeley Public Library this Saturday. Cagney's journey to poetry is an interesting story, and, in Yu's words, the 50-year-old's "late debut was partly deliberate." From there: 

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?’ ”

Learn more at the San Francisco Chronicle.