Poet Henri Coulette achieved literary success early: His first collection, “The War of the Secret Agents” — inspired by a WWII spy ring — was chosen by the Academy of American Poets for its Lamont Poetry Selection, at that time a top honor for a debut author.
But after this initial breakthrough, Coulette never enjoyed that kind of publishing acclaim again. He published just one more collection in his lifetime – 1971’s “The Family Goldschmitt” – and even then, disaster struck: Copies of the book were destroyed in error at the publisher’s warehouse before it could reach a wide readership.
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Coulette at one time had been a dashing character: handsome, witty (if shy), and — unlike the poet stereotype — well-dressed. Known to a select few as “Hank,” he’d been part of a renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop cohort that included future Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners, and he inspired characters in novels by Ross MacDonald and Christopher Isherwood. As a teacher, he made an impact on celebrated poets Wanda Coleman, Michael S. Harper and Luis Omar Salinas during his three decades at California State University, Los Angeles.
Though he published little in his final decades, he did write; Coulette was at work on a final book called “And Come to Closure” near the end of his life. According to a 1992 account in The Kenyon Review by a friend and Cal State colleague Terry Santos, Coulette completed one final poem the night before he died at home in South Pasadena on March 26, 1988 at the age of 60.
There’s also a haunting, haunted quality to Coulette’s story, an early success who went silent too soon. “Henri’s death troubles me: the collapse of what began as a bright career as a poet, and his complete isolation at the end,” wrote his onetime friend and Writers’ Workshop colleague Robert Dana in the New York Times after Coulette’s death; Dana, who alludes to Coulette’s issues with drinking and depression, makes a point of including that he’d been found “in a chair; alone.”
These days, few remember the native Southern Californian or his formal, metered work. While Coulette’s papers are held by The Huntington Library, his writing is largely out of print, though his books can be purchased secondhand, his poems found online or in anthologies at local libraries.
His name, most recently, arose not for his poetry or educational career, but when his former home in Pasadena, which had once been part of Busch Gardens, went on the market. It’s fair to ask whether the poems merit revisiting, so we spoke to an expert.
“My sense is almost no one knows his work anymore. He really is a poet’s poet. But Coulette is, I think, an extraordinary and singular poet, especially in the context of Los Angeles letters,” said Dana Gioia, former California Poet laureate and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, during a phone call. “We tend to think of L.A. poetry as a kind of rough-and-tumble tradition, probably best symbolized by Charles Bukowski and Wanda Coleman. Coulette is utterly different from the general conceptions of what LA poets should be.”
“He is a poet of enormous technique and sophistication who has all of the mastery of East Coast Formalists but he writes with a kind of Southern California casualness,” says Gioia, who included Coulette’s work in the anthology “California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present.”
Southern California famously has a short memory, so it seemed appropriate to talk to those who knew his work — and knew him, in the case of his former wife, 93-year-old retired educator Jackie Coulette — as we approach the 35th anniversary of his death this month.
The Southern California son
Coulette was a native Southern Californian. Born in 1927, he spent his early years in Los Angeles’s Adams district where his home life was less than stable. His family moved a lot — 39 times, by one accounting. By the time he was in his teens, Coulette and his mother, an avid religious seeker, had moved to Santa Fe, NM. Both his parents — Coulette’s musician father, who would die of a heart attack in Henri’s arms, and his mother, with whom the poet had a strained relationship — would appear in poems such as “The Invisible Father” and “Life With Mother.”
During his time in New Mexico, Coulette, a lifelong football fan whose older brother played for Notre Dame, got the chance to play for his high school team. The opportunity was short-lived, but its effects were lasting.
“He was quarterbacking the high school team; this was right at the beginning of 10th grade,” says Jackie Coulette, adding that Henri weighed just 126 pounds at the time. “He was sacked, broke his collarbone, a couple of ribs, and a number of bones in one of his feet. And the doctor said, ‘What in the world made you think you could play football?’
“So that not only ended his football career, but it also ended high school. He had to go to work to pay the doctor bills and to help support his mother. That took care of high school,” says Jackie Coulette, who had a long career as an educator and school principal in Southern California.
Coulette, who would suffer from back problems that in later years seemed to shrink his once-straight frame, found solace in books. “He was a reader. And he first got interested in poetry when he was in Santa Fe. His best buddy’s older sister introduced him to poetry,” says Jackie Coulette.
Young Henri saw the possibilities of literature open up when a librarian mistakenly handed him a racy retelling of “The Three Musketeers” instead of the Alexandre Dumas original he’d requested. “I thought, oh my God, there are actually books about what I’ve been thinking,” Coulette said in a 1982 interview with the poet Harper.
With the Second World War raging at that time, Coulette volunteered and served a brief stint in the Army. “He enlisted when he was 17 and wasn’t in very long when the war ended,” says Jackie Coulette.
Upon his discharge, Coulette headed for Los Angeles and got a job at RKO Studios in the publicity department. In the introduction to a posthumous collection of Coulette’s work edited by his poet friends Donald Justice and Robert Mezey, Justice wrote that film history owes a debt to Coulette: The poet was responsible for saving a trove of materials from “Citizen Kane” that were on their way to be incinerated.
“He got to meet some of the movie people,” says Jackie Coulette. “One of the people that he got to know reasonably well was Robert Mitchum, and he said that Ingrid Bergman was quite the natural beauty but he thought Paulette Goddard was the knockout.”
Along with a lifelong interest in movies, Coulette’s time in Hollywood led to one of his best poems, according to poet, translator and former editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books Boris Dralyuk.
“One of his strongest poems, one of the poems that I find most touching, is called ‘The Extras.’ It describes the life of the extras and their position in society in all its reality and irreality,” says Dralyuk, who wrote an excellent essay about the poet for the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2015 and dedicated a poem to Coulette in his own 2022 collection, “My Hollywood.” (In that essay, Dralyuk does a nifty bit of detective work to find a link between one of Coulette’s poems and the Isherwood prose that inspired it.)
Coulette had hoped to write an extended poem, much like his “The War of the Secret Agents,” about an unsolved Hollywood mystery, says Dralyuk. “He wanted to write something, I think in that style, about the murder of William Desmond Taylor, which was one of the first major scandals in Hollywood. Still unsolved, a fascinating case. Many people have written about it; Coulette wanted to give it the poetic treatment, and I think that tells you a lot about his affection for the city, for its glitter and for its underbelly.
“He also, I think, is a cool customer and writes with a degree of coolness that we associate with the Los Angeles of a certain era, the Los Angeles of the ’40s, ’50s, into the ’60s and there is a kind of Angeleno tone to the poems,” says Dralyuk.”Calm and somewhat rueful. That to me is an Angeleno sound. It’s the sound of West Coast jazz, and we get it in his work.”
A new course
It was around this time that Coulette took a class at Los Angeles State College (later known as Cal State LA) that would have a profound impact on him for two reasons: He met the poet Thomas McGrath – and his future wife Jackie Coulette, a native of Riverside and the San Fernando Valley.
“When I first met him, we were both college students. He said his name was Hank, so I’ve always called him Hank,” says Jackie Coulette, recalling that time. “McGrath took Hank under his arm and really worked with him a lot on his poetry. It really stimulated him to work with McGrath.”
Coulette talked about McGrath in his 1982 interview with Harper. “I’d been reading poetry all along, and then I tried writing a poem and I showed it to Tom. He said, ‘That’s good, let me see some more.’ Hell, I didn’t have any more. So I started writing more. He was a terribly important influence. A lot of other people were encouraged by him. He was a good teacher,” Coulette said of McGrath, who would be forced out of his job for his political convictions during the McCarthy era.
During his time in college, Coulette was active and engaged in literary life. A search through the Cal State LA yearbook archives showed that he’d been the president of the English Club and editor of the school literary publication, “Statement,” to which he contributed some early poems.
Upon graduation in 1952, Henri and Jackie moved to Iowa so Coulette could attend the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His teachers included the noted poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman. Coulette was part of an incredibly talented cohort — future Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners, among them — including Justice, W. D. Snodgrass, Philip Levine, Jane Cooper and others. During his time in Iowa, Coulette earned his master’s degree and doctorate.
But the pull of home was strong. Jackie Coulette, who still loves football, said she and “fanatic football fan” Henri returned to Pasadena to see the Iowa Hawkeyes play in the Rose Bowl in the 1957 and 1959 games. They realized they missed Southern California.
“We wanted to come home after he got his doctorate instead of moving east, He would have had a much bigger reputation if we had gone east,” says Jackie Coulette. “But we wanted to come home.”
After looking into a permanent position at UC Riverside, Henri taught high school for two years before getting hired at L.A. State College where he would remain until the end of his life. “He was a brilliant teacher, and so he did very well there,” says Jackie Coulette. “It was a very energetic department, and at that time it certainly rivaled UCLA or USC. It was really good.”
Andrew Lyndon Knighton, an English professor and the former director of the Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics at California State University, Los Angeles, agrees. The school presents a poetry award in Coulette’s name, the Henri Coulette Academy of American Poets Prize.
“He was beloved as a teacher and won the Outstanding Teaching Award,” says Knighton, who is currently at work on a book about Coulette’s mentor McGrath. “He didn’t fit the stereotype of a poet. He dressed like a banker.”
As a faculty member, Coulette contributed to “Statement,” hosted a radio show about poetry on KPFK and edited some anthologies. He appeared as an expert witness during a 1962 trial on behalf of a Hollywood bookseller who’d been charged with obscenity for selling a copy of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” a book Coulette called “joyous,” per a newspaper account. (In his 1964 novel “A Single Man,” Isherwood based a character on Coulette and used that courtroom testimony as background, a fact Dralyuk alerted me to.)
Jackie Coulette recalled that her former husband had been known around campus for his sense of humor and love of cars, including a Mercedes and a somewhat problematic Jaguar he drove.
“He was parked at Cal State one day and a faculty colleague yelled, ‘Henri, that car is gonna drive you to the poor house!’ And Henri said, ‘Hell no, we’ll have to tow it there,’” Jackie Coulette recalls. “He was one of the wittiest people I’ve ever known.”
Out of step
Coulette’s formal style of poetry, while it had its admirers, was largely at odds with the times he was writing in. But he aimed to bring excitement to the form. When describing “The War of the Secret Agents,” Coulette said in his 1982 interview, “I wanted to write something that would be like a boy’s book, like a spy movie, that would be a thriller, an entertainment by Graham Greene. I wanted to make it as real and vital as television, as soap opera, except in good language. I don’t want poetry out in left field belonging only to people with marvelous sensibilities.”
Coulette’s second book, “The Family Goldschmitt,” was inspired by a message mistakenly slipped under the door of a room where he and Jackie had been staying in Denmark. Jackie remembered the circumstances surrounding the book’s creation. (The book, copies of which still pop up on used book sites, appears to use one of Jackie’s drawings as an uncredited bit of design.)
“We had arrived in Copenhagen from Anchorage. We had been at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks for six weeks,” says Jackie Coulette of their time in Denmark. “We were there for a month because we were waiting for checks from the University of Alaska.”
By the time he published “The Family Goldschmitt,” though, Coulette’s highly structured and metered poems were out of step with the kind of free-wheeling poetry that had gained popularity with 1970s-era readers.
“The failure of his second book affected him very deeply. I think he understood how good a poet he was and wanted to create a perfect work,” says Gioia. “One would see individual poems appear, but then no other book was forthcoming in his lifetime.”
Coulette, whose marriage to Jackie would end, withdrew, neglected his health and published less as time went on. In his final years, his world grew smaller, and other than a beloved dog named Rags, a few colleagues and old friends and a continuing friendship with Jackie, Henri seemed to have pulled — or pushed — away from a number of relationships.
“People kind of lost track of him before he died,” says Knighton. “It definitely feels like he had withdrawn from the world.”
The afterlives of the poets
Despite Coulette’s diminished profile, his small group of admirers continues to see the merit and influence of his work.
“I do think that people will be reading Coulette in, you know, 50, 100 years from now,” says Gioia. “He’s never going to be Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson, but the poems are good enough that the best of them are not going to go away.
“His work reminds us that Los Angeles is a sophisticated and intelligent city,” says Gioia. “Coulette was, at least for formal poets, the first one who was entirely at home in the chaotic and rich diversity of Los Angeles.”
He adds, “It’s sad that so much of his best work only appeared posthumously.”
Dralyuk sees a hallmark of the Southern California experience displayed in Coulette’s work.
“The other thing that I think makes him a quintessentially Angeleno poet is his loneliness, his loneliness in a crowd,” says Dralyuk, who refers to the title of a small pamphlet of Coulette’s uncollected poems published posthumously by his friends Justice and Mezey. “They titled it, ‘The Enormous Lonelies.’ That really is, you know, the heart of Coulette.
“The poems for which he was known in the ’60s are about loneliness in Los Angeles,” Dralyuk continues, citing “Hermit,” a pair of poems Coulette wrote about a real-life World War II veteran with mental health issues who’d been found living in Griffith Park. “Coulette became, I think, quite fascinated and even identified to some extent with the desire to disappear into Griffith Park, into this vast stretch of green in the midst of an urban landscape. So there’s this sense of being alone, among others, that I also think, is quite typical of the Los Angeles ethos.”
The late Coleman, Los Angeles’ most renowned poet these days, concluded her collection “Bathwater Wine” with a Coulette-inspired poem “The Sacred History of the Gone,” and cited Coulette’s influence in an interview with Charles Joseph.
“Henri Coulette, whose poetry class I entered at Cal State L.A. in Fall 1964, is perhaps the most important influence of them all,” said Coleman, who described him as an intimidating figure, a “smoking wraith,” in her book “The Riot Inside Me.” “He taught me the value of frank unbiased criticism, one thing that I try to perpetuate when I am now occasionally teaching.”
A fan of mysteries, Coulette tried to lure crime writer Ross MacDonald to the Cal State campus for a visiting professorship; the novelist, whose real name was Kenneth Millar, declined but the two became pals. “They were very close friends,” says Jackie Coulette.
According to “It’s All One Case: The Illustrated Ross MacDonald Archives,” the men inspired each other: MacDonald’s novel “The Blue Hammer” got its title from a Coulette poem, and MacDonald dedicated “The Goodbye Look” to the poet and seemed to name characters after him, including a “Henry” and a “Culotti.” Coulette used a line from MacDonald’s novel “The Ferguson Affair” for his poem, “The Blue-Eyed Precinct Worker.”
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While Coulette may not be in line for a massive resurgence — some of his writing remains of its time — his work and that quiet, melancholy voice remain.
“He died too young. I think if he had lived another 10-15 years,” says Gioia, “he would have had more recognition.”
Dralyuk, however, says Coulette’s fate is not such a terrible one.
“I ultimately am not as upset about his neglect as one might imagine. I do think that obscurity is as reversible as fame, in its own way. And what really stays behind is the work,” says Dralyuk. “As long as there are some serious readers, he’ll have his success.”