Henri Coulette

Henri Coulette. Courtesy Cal State LA.

Henri Coulette (November 17, 1927 – March 26, 1988) was an American poet and academic.

Life

Coulette was born in Los Angeles, California. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1952 from Los Angeles State College, (now California State University, Los Angeles). He then studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, after which he returned to California.

He spent nearly his entire career as a faculty member at California State University, Los Angeles.

Coulette's debut collection of poetry, The War of the Secret Agents, and other poems (Scribner, 1965), was greeted with acclaim. His next collection, The Family Goldschmitt (Scribner, 1971), seems to have received little attention, and it has been reported that much of the print run was accidentally pulped.

Writing

Petition

Lord of the Tenth Life,

Welcome my Jerome,

A fierce, gold tabby.

Make him feel at home.

He loves bird and mouse,

He loves a man's lap,

And in winter light,

Paws tucked in, a nap.

Henri Coulette

Coulette published only 2 books during his life, but had been organizing a volume when he died. After Coulette's death, Donald Justice and Robert Mezey edited his collected poetry, including a wealth of unpublished poems, and published the volume in 1990 through the University of Arkansas Press.

Of his later poems Tad Richards has written, "Though only in his fifties, he surveys the territory of death, particularly in the near-perfect 'Petition,' an elegy for his cat, with a concreteness he did not often find in life."

Recognition

The War of the Secret Agents, and other poems won the Lamont Poetry Prize.

2 of Coulette's poems, "Night Thoughts" and "Postscript", were included in the 2003 anthology, California Poetry: From the gold rush to the present; the editors write that "Coulette melded seamless metrics with a lifelong devotion to California icons like the LBG-30 (a Glendale computer), the noir Los Angeles memorialized by Raymond Chandler, and the gravesites of Hollywood movie stars."

Publications

• The License and the Limit: Four poems. Iowa City, IA: privately published, 1958.
• The Attic (thesis). 1959.
• The War of the Secret Agents, and other poems. New York: Scribner, 1966.
• The Family Goldschmitt: Poems. New York: Scribner, 1971.
• Collected Poems (edited by Donald Justice & Robert Mezey). Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1990.

Edited

• Midland: Twenty-five years of fiction and poetry from writing workshops of the State University of Iowa (edited with Paul Engle & Donald Justice). New York: Random House, 1961.
• The Unstrung Lyre: Interviews with fourteen poets. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 1965.
• Character and Crisis: A contemporary reader (edited with Philip Levine). New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Journals

• The Enormous Lonelies: Selections from the notebooks of Henri Coulette. [Edgeworth, KY?]: RLB, 1998.

  

  WD Snodgrass - Henri Coulette's 'War of the Secret Agents'

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• Henri Coulette 1927-1988 at the Poetry Foundation
• Henri Coulette at PoemHunter (6 poems, .PDF)
• Henri Coulette at AllPoetry (8 poems)

Books

• Henri Coulette at Amazon.com

About

• Henri Coulette Biography at eNotes