Operative words
An education in discernment.
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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, wryly 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; and the “open forms” Mezey and Stephen Berg championed 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 failed 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 eventually eclipsed his own. Increasingly alienated from the literary world and, in the last decade of his life, divorced 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 in the U.S. poetry scene. Not even in death did 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 the reader has not heard of Henri Coulette, it comes as no surprise. It is, however, a situation that ought to be remedied. His time has come. Poetry has always had its moods, whole climate shifts indeed, according to which a poet’s 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. That 1990 Collected Poems, which long ago went out of print, testifies to his strikingly good ear and assured way with a variety of forms. The drama of “The War of the Secret Agents,” the sequence that gave Coulette’s first book its title, depends on a sharp sense of the interplay of competing voices; 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 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 settings inspired by detective fiction (the crime novelist Ross Macdonald was a friend) but also lesser-known corners of the city’s suburbs and wry domestic interiors.
Another virtue: the reader should be wary of taking Coulette’s evocations solely at face value. “The War of the Secret Agents,” for example, finds inspiration in the misadventures of the British Special Operations Executive during the Second World War, in a world of codenames and shadowy identities; it draws on Jean Overton Fuller’s writings about soe and its less fortunate agents in France, published during the 1950s. Coulette could attach another meaning to these wartime maneuverings, though. In an interview with Michael S. Harper, he characterized the sequence as “really a way I had of describing my neurosis,” a way to “describe the way I saw the world.” The spy’s job of listening, watching, and keeping quiet had something fundamental in common with the passage from childhood to adulthood (a passage the young Coulette was still undertaking during the Second World War): “I found out one of the ways that you survive is to keep your mouth shut. You become a secret agent.” In shorter poems, meanwhile, such as “Life with Mother” and “The Family Goldschmitt,” identity remains unstable, ready to undergo a metamorphosis in the course of a few stanzas. The shock of history still reverberates through these poems, whether that means the perilous world of Henrician England, France in the wake of the Holocaust, or the United States under the political and cultural hammerblows of the 1960s. One kind of shock, however, may often disguise another, and the scale of the impact is implicit in the act of disguise itself.
We have tried, without a single quotation from his poems, to limn Coulette’s mode, and that mode may already strike some readers as familiar. An obsession with disguises, a magpie’s hunger for obscure sources plucked from every stratum of culture, a gift for dramatic counterpoint, for allusions intricate yet lightly worn, for mimicry that enriches without erasing the poet’s personality—these are the stock-in-trade of T. S. Eliot, who, in his (fictional) role as Overton Fuller’s editor at Faber, makes a cameo appearance in “The War of the Secret Agents.” Yet Coulette wasn’t merely playing Possum. His own four-piece suit was of an original cut, fashioned, as he suggested to Harper, by neurotic insecurities stemming from an unstable childhood in a home full of secrets.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 44 Number 8, on page 23
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