The pen and the sword

You might think that Japanese sword arts and contemporary American poetry have little in common. That means you need to read Mad Cursive, the latest collection from Sacramento State University professor of English Joshua McKinney, an accomplished fencer and swordsman. His third book Mad Cursive strikes out into new territory for the poet. It includes prose poems and it also has a series that he calls “the meme poems” that take their points of departure from the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. No, it’s not what you expect poetry to do, but McKinney likes the unexpected.

What happens to poetry when you juxtapose it with the language of war?

First, questions of violence arise. One of the things I was interested in exploring in this book was questions of violence in language itself. Violence in the martial arts is misunderstood in the West. I know a lot of people who say, “Oh, I’m so surprised you do that. You’re a poet and you’re scholarly, and you do this violent stuff.” They’re appalled.

But really, for many, many centuries, even in Japan, the martial arts have not been concerned with a warfare application. It has to do with the spirit, with perfection of one’s self, with beauty, with making the body at one with motion and then unifying it with the mind.

Is there a connection between the formality of the Japanese sword arts and your writing?

I see a physical connection with poetry—breath, the kinesis of actually pounding on a keyboard or writing on a pad—is an extension of the body as well. I think a lot of people forget about that these days. Formalists don’t, and that’s why I’m interested in formalism—not that I’m a formalist, but I’m very interested in them.

One of my primary methods of composition—and this is evident in many of the untitled pieces in this book—is to write first in a form, particularly the curtal sonnet of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a little 11-line sonnet. Then I dismantle or rearrange the sonnet. This is an example of the kato, or the root martial-arts form, one practices—like shadowboxing. No matter how good you get at that, though, it’s never real combat. You have to be able to respond spontaneously.

So, I use the form to generate the poem, and then I deviate from it in the ways I think will serve the poem best. There are limitations to the form, in other words.

What’s the deal with writing a completely different style of poetry in every book?

It has to do, I think, with my aesthetic overall, my poetics. First of all, I’m not sure why someone would want to be too consistent in their poetry. To me—and I kind of outlined my aesthetics in the preface to Mad Cursive—I operate with the idea that you have to be prepared for everything, if writing is analogous to combat—well, in the real world, that’s kind of silly, but I do think about it that way.

There’s an old saying among swordsmen that the most dangerous opponent is the guy who doesn’t know anything about fencing, because you don’t know what he’s going to do. So we practice our fencing technique or our poetry technique, and sometimes we get good at it in a certain way, but we never try anything different. We lack spontaneity.

And also—this is the most important aspect of it—for me, as a writer, I want to try something new. I want to be excited by the language. So, just as another extension of that martial analogy, I try to find new kinds of opponents, if you will, who do different things—things that I might not anticipate.

It’s the opposite of the specialist.

I’ve always been interested in the Renaissance notion of sprezzatura, the courtier who made everything look easy. It’s a courtly Western knight as opposed to the samurai version of it. But the samurai, too, were lettered and were artists.

The kanji in the background on the cover [of Mad Cursive] is bun bu ichi. “Writing,” “warfare” and the numeral 1: It expresses the idea of unity in the martial arts between the pen and the sword.

Some poets write individual poems, some write series and some poets write a book at a time. What’s your process like?

That’s an interesting question, considering this book. I tend to prefer discrete poems. Ah, the discrete poem! Where has it gone?

The whole meme series was sort of a pissed-off reaction to what I think of as the contest-winning books—the concept-driven series of poems, a book at a time—where you have to read cover to cover to get an appreciation of the book.

I wonder if that’s not some sort of poetic response to the novel or something. One of the things that I love about poetry is that I have a short little attention span, and I can read a poem the way I eat a bonbon. I don’t have to roast a pig.

So [with the] meme series, I thought, “I’m going to hop on that bandwagon!” I just picked the quirkiest thing I could. My son had been playing a lot of Modern Warfare 2. I’d played some of it, and I was very interested in some of the things I saw going on there, socially and metaphorically, in that game.

Then, the project, pretty quickly, became serious.