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 ...