Henri Coulette was an American poet and educator. His first book, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems

The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems

The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems is the debut book of poetry by Henri Coulette, 1927-1988, published in 1965 by Scribner's. Winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize, awarded at that time for a poet's first book....

(Scribner

Charles Scribner's Sons

Charles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City, known for publishing a number of American authors including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Robert A. Heinlein, Thomas Wolfe, George Santayana, John Clellon...

, 1965), was greeted with acclaim and won the Lamont Poetry Prize

James Laughlin Award

The James Laughlin Award, formerly the Lamont Poetry Prize, is given annually for a poet's second published book; it is the only major poetry award that honors a second book...

. His second collection, The Family Goldschmitt

The Family Goldschmitt

The Family Goldschmitt is the second [and last to be published during his life] collection of poetry by Henri Coulette . The bulk of the printing was allegedly pulped by accident, leading to a very narrow distribution of the book, though used copies are not terribly scarce...

(Scribner, 1971), 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 (a Glendale computer), the noir Los Angeles memorialized by Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in...

, and the gravesites of Hollywood movie stars."

Coulette was born in Los Angeles, California

Los Angeles, California

Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...

, and earned a bachelor's degree in 1952 from Los Angeles State College, now known as California State University, Los Angeles

California State University, Los Angeles

California State University, Los Angeles is a public comprehensive university, part of the California State University system...

. He studied at the University of 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. After Coulette's death, Donald Justice

Donald Justice

Donald Justice was an American poet and teacher of writing. In summing up Justice's career, David Orr has written, "In most ways, Justice was no different from any number of solid, quiet older writers devoted to traditional short poems. But he was different in one important sense: sometimes his...

 and Robert Mezey

Robert Mezey

Robert Mezey is an American poet, critic and academic. He is also a noted translator, in particular from Spanish, having translated with Richard Barnes the collected poems of Borges....

 edited his collected poetry, which included a wealth of unpublished poems, and published the volume in 1990 through the University of Arkansas

University of Arkansas

The University of Arkansas is a public, co-educational, land-grant, space-grant, research university. It is classified by the Carnegie Foundation as a research university with very high research activity. It is the flagship campus of the University of Arkansas System and is located in...

 Press.

Works

• The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems (Scribner, 1965)
• The Family Goldschmitt (Scribner, 1971)
• The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette, ed. by Donald Justice
  Donald Justice
  Donald Justice was an American poet and teacher of writing. In summing up Justice's career, David Orr has written, "In most ways, Justice was no different from any number of solid, quiet older writers devoted to traditional short poems. But he was different in one important sense: sometimes his...
  
   and Robert Mezey
  Robert Mezey
  Robert Mezey is an American poet, critic and academic. He is also a noted translator, in particular from Spanish, having translated with Richard Barnes the collected poems of Borges....
  
  (Arkansas, 1990)