Henri Coulette

Henri Coulette (1927-1988), who spent most of his life in Los Angeles, was regarded as a master craftsman and a quiet original by his teachers Robert Lowell and John Berryman, his peers Donald Justice, W.D. Snodgrass, Thom Gunn, ad Philip Levine, and his students Wanda Coleman, Michael Harper, and Luis Omar Salinas. His first volume, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems (1966), won the Lamont Poetry Prize and received significant praise, but his second, The Family Goldschmitt (1971), was accidentally pulped by the distributor. A third volume only saw publication as part of his Collected Poems (1990), now long out of print.