One last poem by M.A. Jenene

[An untitled poem by M.A. [Mary Ann] Jenene. Published in Graphite (1923).]

This is the fifth M.A. Jenene poem that I’ve been able to uncover, and it’s the poem that appears to have brought her work as a published writer to an end.

Correspondence in the files of Graphite (found at the Modernist Journals Archive) reveals that not long after the little magazine published this poem, an editorial assistant recognized the word cento in the cover letter that Jenene had sent with two poems. And then the assistant recognized this poem’s first line as drawn from the poetry of William Butler Yeats. And then another line, and another: yes, all five lines came from Yeats. And then the assistant checked recent issues of other little magazines for Jenene poems: and yes, the lines of her four other published poems all came from Yeats.

What other readers may have taken as a name for Jenene’s signature five-line form, cento, a term used in each of her cover letters, turned out to be a name for a poem made of lines taken from one or more other writers. It may appear that Jenene was following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land (1922) borrowed from a multitude of source texts. But in making five-line poems from the poetry of William Butler Yeats, Jenene was doing something quite different — something parodic and playful. Here again she seemed to anticipate, decades before their time, the poetic practices of the so-called New York School. See, for instance, John Ashbery’s cento “The Dong with the Luminous Nose.”

In 1923, parodic play was not what it was to be decades later. The editor of Graphite, Chester Burnett, sent Jenene a sharply worded letter. Jenene’s reply, profusely apologetic, made clear that she had had no intention to deceive anyone, Yeats’s work being well known to American audiences. But she never published again.

The 1950 census shows Jenene, once called “Rhode Island’s own poet of moods,” living in Providence, employed at a department store. That might have been the Peerless Company or Shepard’s, each a venerable Rhode Island establishment. One might imagine a young Ted Berrigan, in search of a gift for his mother, encountering salesperson Jenene among the women’s scarves. Perhaps he had a book of poetry in hand. Perhaps Jenene noticed it and (shyly) struck up a conversation. Perhaps Berrigan learned something of her work and — perhaps — found in her poetics of appropriation and reinvention an early inspiration for the collage-like poems of The Sonnets (1964).

Related reading
All OCA M.A. Jenene posts : Two Ted Berrigan poems, “A Final Sonnet” and ”Whoa Back Buck and Gee by Land“