Henri Coulette

Henri Coulette Poems

Henri Coulette Biography

Coulette was an educator, editor, and poet best known for his traditionally metered poetry. He taught English at California State University—Los Angeles for almost thirty years. Formerly he had been a high school English teacher and an instructor at the University of Iowa's writer's workshop. Coulette's first volume of poetry, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems, won the Lamont Poetry Award and received significant critical attention. Coulette was described as "a poet to watch" by Dudley Fitts in the New York Times Book Review. Discussing the title poem in Coulette's collection The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems, Fitts claimed to be "frustrated throughout [this poem] by opacities of allusion and reference." However, he also praised it: "Isolated passages show power. The poem is skillfully written." And Mother Mary Anthony wrote in Western Humanities Review that The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems is "work of a high order—disciplined originality and strong patterning, layered irony and powerful understatement." Coulette also edited Midland: Twenty-five Years of Fiction and Poetry From Writing Workshops of the State University of Iowa; The Unstrung Lyre: Interviews With Fourteen Poets; and Character and Crisis: A Contemporary Reader.)

The Best Poem Of Henri Coulette

The Black Angel

Where are the people as beautiful as poems,
As calm as mirrors,
With their oceanic longings —
The idler whom reflection loved,
The woman with the iridescent brow?
For I would bring them flowers.

I think of that friend too much moved by music
Who turned to games
And made a game of boredom,
Of that one too much moved by faces
Who turned his face to the wall, and of that marvelous liar
Who turned at last to truth.

They are the past of what was always future.
They speak in tongues,
Silently, about nothing.
They are like old streetcars buried at sea,
In the wrong element, with no place to go . . . .
I will not meet her eye,

Although I shall, but here's a butterfly,
And a white flower,
An the moon rising on my nail.
This is the presence of things present,
Where flying woefully is like closing sweetly,
And there is nothing else.

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