Henri Coulette

Who was Henri Coulette?

Henri Coulette was an American poet and educator. His first book, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems, was greeted with acclaim and won the Lamont Poetry Prize. His second collection, The Family Goldschmitt, seems to have received little attention, and it has been reported that much of the print run was accidentally pulped. He did not publish another book during his life, but had been organizing a volume when he died. Of these 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." Two 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, the noir Los Angeles memorialized by Raymond Chandler, and the gravesites of Hollywood movie stars."