REMEMBERING Henri Coulette
The late poet and Cal State L.A. faculty member is a forgotten voice for Los Angeles
Henri Coulette’s connection to Cal State L.A. was lifelong, as both student and professor: He and his wife, Jackie, appear in the 1952 yearbook, above, and at right is Henri Coulette in a lighter moment. As he aged, he seemed to withdraw from the world.
Poet Henri Coulette achieved literary success early: His first collection, “The War of the Secret Agents” — inspired by a World War II 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.
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 Cal State 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 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 age 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 Iowa 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,” says 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 L.A. 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
Henri Coulette was a native Southern Californian. Born in 1927, he spent his early years in Los Angeles’ 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, he and his mother, an avid religious seeker, had moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Both his parents — his musician father, who would die of a heart attack in Henri Coulette’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, Henri 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.
Henri 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,” Henri Coulette said in a 1982 interview with the poet Harper.
With the Second World War raging at that time, he 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, he 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 having 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 Henri Coulette in his own 2022 collection, “My Hollywood.”
Henri 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 Henri Coulette took a class at Los Angeles State College (later known as Cal State L.A.) that would have a profound impact on him for two reasons: He met poet Thomas McGrath — and his future wife, a native of Riverside and the San Fernando Valley.
Henri 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,” Henri Coulette said of McGrath, who would be forced out of his job for his political convictions during the McCarthy era.
“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.”