Biography | Poem | Praise for 'Mud Season'

About Jane McKinley
Jane McKinley is a professional musician who specializes in performing music of the 17th and 18th centuries on period instruments. A native of Iowa, she began playing the oboe at the age of nine and continued her study of music at Northwestern University, where she received a Bachelor of Music degree with highest distinction, and Princeton University, where she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in historical musicology. In 1985 she traveled to Vienna to study Baroque oboe with Jürg Schaeftlein, one of the pioneers in playing historical oboes. She performs throughout the Northeast as a free-lance musician and currently serves as artistic director for the Dryden Ensemble, a Baroque chamber music group which she founded in 1994.

In April of 2003, haunted by an image, she was driven to write a poem—the first she'd written since she was seventeen. A week later she enrolled in a poetry workshop at the Princeton YWCA with Jean Hollander, known for her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. The Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York has played a pivotal role in Ms. McKinley's development as a poet. From 2004 to the present, she has taken numerous workshops, tutorials, and master classes there with poets Grace Schulman, Rachel Wetzsteon, Jane Hirshfield, Emily Fragos, and, most recently, a manuscript workshop with Marie Ponsot. Since 2004 she has also been an active member of the U.S. 1 Poets' Cooperative, a poetry critique group based in Princeton that has been meeting weekly for thirty-five years. In addition to putting together her first manuscript, Niobe's Daughter, she is working on an English translation of a recent collection by the Dutch poet Rutger Kopland.

Though a relative newcomer to to the poetry world, she has always had a keen interest in language, literature, and the close observation of nature - passions instilled in her at an early age by her parents. She lives in Hopewell, New Jersey with her husband, Gooitzen van der Wal, and their two children, Simon and Elsa.

Three of her poems have been published in U.S. 1 Worksheets, Princeton, New Jersey:

• Da Capo (2006), nominated for a Pushcart Prize
• Becoming Pan (2007)
• The Seer (2008)

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'Mud Season'
by Jane McKinley

Mud Season (2nd grade)

Mid April. Bloodroot's promise in the air.
We ride along with Dad to see the piglets
born the night before. The pick-up swerves, jiggles
to a halt. Dad's face goes gray, his dark hair's
damp with sweat. He stumbles out, collapsing
near the ditch. Run for help...leave Philip here.
I fly, my winged Keds barely grazing, smeared
with mud, reach a distant farmhouse, rapping
sharp as knuckles can, scared no one will come.
The tar-patched door creaks open, and a child
peeks out. It's Debbie Tuckey. She's the one
we laughed at last week, taunting her with combs.
Her mother holds my shoulder, while her wild-
haired, gentle father rushes to the phone.

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Praise for 'Mud Season'

Ann Townsend, final judge for the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, had this to say about Jane McKinley's prize-winning poem:

In a group of excellent finalists, 'Mud Season' stands out for multiple reasons. First, its narrative of emergency, flight, and arrival is simply compelling; it pulls me in and keeps me reading. I also admire the poem's intense compression and energized drama. The story of a stricken father, a child running for help, and finding it in an unexpected way - these elements are moving without being sentimental. The fact that this poem is a sonnet further heightens the compression and intensity here. The author skillfully renders the sonnet's enduring form, and further, makes it relevant to contemporary language and concerns.

I admire how the poet has gracefully mastered the rhetorical shift from octave to sestet, just past the halfway point in the poem. This is where sonnets traditionally change gears, move from exposition to resolution. The narrator says 'I fly, winged Keds barely grazing, smeared / with mud, reach a distant farmhouse, rapping / sharp as knuckles can, scared no one will come.' The poem shifts from octave to sestet after the word 'rapping,' and the knock at the door announces both the narrator's arrival at a destination and, as well, sets in motion what follows. The door opens, and 'It's Debbie Tuckey...the one / we laughed at last week, taunting her...' This is a surprise to both the narrator and the reader. What I love about this poem is the way that the two lines that follow, and that end the poem, resolve both the emergency in the present, and the injury of the past, in two simple and loving gestures: 'Her mother holds my shoulder, while her wild-/haired, gentle father rushes to the phone.' 'Mud Season' will stay with me, in my mind's eye, for a long time to come.

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