Reviving Henri Coulette

It is a great irony that Henri Coulette, a poet of remarkable refinement and exquisite formal control – the son, no less, of a gifted musician – suffered from such terrible timing. Part of a cohort at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1950s that included Philip Levine, W.D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice and Robert Mezey, Coulette seemed destined to share the success of his peers in the decade ahead. Yet by the time his first collection, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems, won the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and appeared in 1966, the impeccably polished, wittily elegiac, ironically self-effacing poems it contained were distinctly out of fashion. In instead were the ‘confessional’ mode pioneered by Snodgrass and adopted by their teachers at Iowa, Robert Lowell and John Berryman; the Beat howls emanating from San Francisco; the ‘open forms’ Mezey and Stephen Berg would champion in their immensely popular anthology Naked Poetry (1969). To make things worse, most of the copies of Coulette’s second collection, The Family Goldschmitt (1971), were accidentally pulped at the publisher’s warehouse, ensuring that the book would fail to receive even the lukewarm reviews that greeted his debut.

Although he never stopped writing poems and continued to enjoy the friendship, admiration and support of his better-known colleagues, Coulette published less and less. A proud Angeleno, he taught for decades at his alma mater, California State University – Los Angeles, mentoring poets such as Wanda Coleman, Michael S. Harper and Luis Omar Salinas, whose reputations would eventually eclipse his own. Increasingly alienated from the literary world and, in the last decade of his life, estranged from his beloved wife, he died in 1988, at sixty-one, just as the New Formalism movement, in which he might have played a leading role, was gaining traction on the US poetry scene. Not even in death would Coulette strike it lucky. A sumptuous Collected Poems, lovingly compiled by Justice and Mezey in 1990, could have established his posthumous legacy, but it was savaged in print by Levine, once the closest of Coulette’s friends, with whom he had fallen out at some point in the late 1970s.

In short, if you have not heard of Henri Coulette, it comes as no surprise to us. It is, however, a situation that ought to be remedied. His time has come. Poetry has always had its moods, whole climate shifts indeed, by which persisting in existing modes of form and thought may be dismissed as not just démodé but altogether redundant. Coulette belongs to that club of writers either widely ignored in their own era or working in willed obscurity, whose original qualities nevertheless ought to ensure an enduring reputation. The poems below testify to his strikingly good ear and assured way with both classical metres and freer rhythms. Read such work out loud and you catch a sense of phrase unfolding from phrase, of repetition and variation, of ruminative, sometimes bleakly humorous verbal music. If there is despair here, it is elegantly done. A touch of Weldon Kees’s black mood may be felt here more than once, but Coulette territory is, taken as a whole, something else, touched also by a sense of the absurd: it stretches from war-torn Europe and Renaissance England to his own backyard in Los Angeles, including not only Hollywood and scenes inspired by detective fiction (the crime novelist Ross Macdonald was a friend) but lesser-known corners of the city’s suburbs and wry domestic interiors. Hank, as he was known to his friends, was no mere ‘extra’ in the story of twentieth-century US poetry. We look forward to giving him the moment in the spotlight he has long been denied.