Returned From the Wilderness
Henri Coulette, ed. Michael Caines and Boris Dralyuk, New and Selected Poems
Carcanet, 162pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781800175525
reviewed by Austin Spendlowe
Henri ‘Hank’ Coulette is not known by many. The blame for that lies mostly with his publisher, who had his second book, The Family Goldschmitt (1971), mistakenly pulped. That mishap lead Coulette’s friend Donald Justice to muse in his essay ‘Oblivion’ that ‘[t]here is a randomness in the operation of the laws of fame that approaches the chaotic.’ But Coulette had long been overlooked before that fatal error. His ‘impeccably polished, wittily elegiac, ironically self-effacing poems’, we’re told in the editors’ introduction, ‘were distinctly out of fashion.’ The moment’s vogue was not for the neat forms of Coulette, but the ‘confessional’ lyrics of W.D. Snodgrass or the ‘open forms’ of Robert Mezey, who both studied with Coulette at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1950s. Coulette was and has remained something of ‘a waif in the wilderness’, to cadge from ‘The War and the Secret Agents’. The poetry selected here, from the two published collections, and the poet’s private papers, mounts a compelling case for his reappraisal.
Those who leaf through Coulette’s work will quickly pick up the smell of polish. Even the earliest lyrics in The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems (1966) strut their enviable facility with the most gruelling forms. The intricate sixains of ‘The Junk Shop’ and ‘Cygnets House’ (both a10b4b6c8a10c6), or ‘The Black Angel’ (a10b4b8c8a10c6), would not look out of place in the metrical appendix to David Norbrook and Henry Woudhuysen’s Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse. That Tom McGrath, the poet’s first teacher, had Coulette reading W.B. Yeats early is no surprise given the ease of his polymetry. Coulette’s meticulous forms play host to wit and verve and murk by turns, compressed into images that linger. The image of, for example, ‘gentle kooks / who would stand at the crossroads’ (‘Once’) is difficult to shake, as is the opening question of ‘The Sickness of Friends’:
The syntax cuts cleverly against the grain of the line, which Coulette carries off in a nimble, chatty metre. This is not the ego-ladened poetry that won plaudits for Robert Lowell and John Berryman, who both taught Coulette at Iowa. Nor is it the wheeling vers libre that drew many to Ginsberg and his ilk. Coulette’s is a neat, tailored art.
Many moods cohere in the six-part ‘Bitter Suite’, which begins soberly, ‘life reproaches art’. Coulette moves through the endearingly silly:
— then trades in the cheery rhythms of Edward Lear for the lewder side of Ogden Nash –
— and lands ultimately on a touching elegy for his father:
The sequence holds that limericks and epitaphs are sister arts, that mirth is adjacent to gloom, for a mixture of feeling which proves central to Coulette’s craft.
His many guises return in ‘Chicken Rampant, Bar Sinister’, which opens with ‘thirteen secret names’ and the speaker’s admission to a doctor that ‘some of my selves, / … are always out of town.’ But these are not the costumes of a latter-day Pessoa. The need to shapeshift was an heirloom from Coulette’s father, who altered his name from Rosario Ruggiero Cullotta to bury his Italian roots. (N.B. The bar sinister of the poem’s mock-heraldic title, a diagonal strip that leans left on a coat of arms, signals birth out of wedlock, the near-homophonic bastardy.)
The jewel in the crown of this first book is the seventeen-part spy thriller pastiche ‘The War of the Secret Agents’, which the editors thankfully give in full. The work is a composite of histories literary and lived: ‘they were dust’, runs the six-line anacrusis, ‘and I took that dust in hand.’ The poem proper begins with a ‘Proem’, whose title and mock-genealogical nod to [the characters’ origins in] ‘a teen-age novel / (The Motor Boys and the Gestapo)’ spoof the old long poems of Chaucer or Spenser. Nonetheless, it sets up an interest in history that Coulette bears out in his fixation on the forms of record: letters, diary excerpts, jottings on the backs of envelopes, and graffiti. The cast, as per the ‘Dramatis Personae’, includes the scholar Jane Alabastor, who is researching a book on espionage in World War II France (read: Jean Overton Fuller); Kieffer, the head of the Paris Gestapo, whose diaries, we learn in one wry footnote, betray a man beyond his passions for ‘beautiful / women, good food, and sports cars.’ The last joke of the ‘Dramatis Personae’ is the last entry: ‘T.S. Eliot, an editor.’ ‘I thought it was funny,’ explained Coulette to poet Michael S. Harper in 1982, ‘to take the high priest and describe him simply as an editor.’ The poem skips through in syllabics like a prime Thom Gunn. And, save for some garbled wordplay (‘The doctors regard me as a classic case, / and that’s the story / that I’ve doctored up for them’, ‘XIV. Wulf, At the Asylum’), Coulette never misfires.
The witty, irreverent War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems made way for loftier aims in The Family Goldschmitt, ‘an attempt’, he told Harper, ‘to deal with that question, how do those things happen? The Holocaust, how does that happen.’ The weightier subject matter does not preclude Coulette’s especial je-ne-sais-quoi. The title poem has the kind of flight from the humdrum for which Coulette ought to be better known: the landlady is a ‘blonde aura / of everything Nordic, Clairol, / And kroner, the Dowager Queen / Of Inner and Outer Chaos.’ Elsewhere, Coulette is happy to step out of frame entirely, as in ‘On the Balcony’, epigraphed to Martin Luther King Jr.:
Here Coulette summons something more gnomic than he has previously managed. The sparse couplets leave room for Coulette’s lyric weave to really sing. Moments of finesse like these struggle to outrun the facts of daily life, as at the close of ‘Situational Comedy’:
Like that of Philip Larkin, whose poetry he greatly revered, Coulette’s art happens in spite of life.
To these two published collections, Justice and Mezey added the unfinished manuscript of the follow-up, And Come to Closure, in The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette (1990). Caines and Dralyuk include from these a pair of lyrics about Thomas Wyatt (‘The Renaissance in England’ and ‘Newfangleness’), which underscores Coulette’s longstanding debts to the past: ‘If we know history,’ Coulette told Harper, ‘we’re obliged to repeat its virtues, its beauties.’ In ‘The Garden’, ‘A hummingbird whirrs by, / Towing the purple evening in his wake’, and with it nails down Coulette’s lyric gifts. Some witty epigrams (e.g., ‘Everything here is Spanish but the fly. / My name, Señor, she is Roberto Bly.’) restore a distinctly Coulettian blend of gaiety and graft.
‘Horace: IV, I’, a take on the Roman poet’s ode, is the only translation of Coulette’s that the editors include. Neither his swish Catullus 5 (‘Vivamus, mea Lesbia’) nor his clever versions of José-Maria Heredia or Philippe Jaccottet from The War Agents makes the cut. However, the editors more than make up for that oversight with the crop of discoveries from the Coulette’s papers. The best of the bunch is ‘Cry Figs’, not least for the ease of its villanelle. Some lines were probably best left in the archive: ‘The bed is waiting like a prize / With which you will reward yourselves’ from the otherwise intriguing ‘Address of the Ghosts to the New Tenants’ is surely one of them. But ‘Quake’, the book’s parting gift, is superb. Its glitzy cast of ‘Jack Donne’, ‘Raymond Chandler’ and ‘Bertolt Brecht’ hurtle towards a killer couplet tie of thwarted desire:
We have in Henri Coulette a new major minor poet to marvel at: his forms are exact, his humour dark and wry, and he wears his learning lightly. Credit must go to the editors and to Carcanet for recognising that Coulette is a secret better shared than kept.
Those who leaf through Coulette’s work will quickly pick up the smell of polish. Even the earliest lyrics in The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems (1966) strut their enviable facility with the most gruelling forms. The intricate sixains of ‘The Junk Shop’ and ‘Cygnets House’ (both a10b4b6c8a10c6), or ‘The Black Angel’ (a10b4b8c8a10c6), would not look out of place in the metrical appendix to David Norbrook and Henry Woudhuysen’s Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse. That Tom McGrath, the poet’s first teacher, had Coulette reading W.B. Yeats early is no surprise given the ease of his polymetry. Coulette’s meticulous forms play host to wit and verve and murk by turns, compressed into images that linger. The image of, for example, ‘gentle kooks / who would stand at the crossroads’ (‘Once’) is difficult to shake, as is the opening question of ‘The Sickness of Friends’:
Do I give off in the wee,
small hours a phosphorescent
glow, perhaps, like rotting wood?
The syntax cuts cleverly against the grain of the line, which Coulette carries off in a nimble, chatty metre. This is not the ego-ladened poetry that won plaudits for Robert Lowell and John Berryman, who both taught Coulette at Iowa. Nor is it the wheeling vers libre that drew many to Ginsberg and his ilk. Coulette’s is a neat, tailored art.
Many moods cohere in the six-part ‘Bitter Suite’, which begins soberly, ‘life reproaches art’. Coulette moves through the endearingly silly:
Oh, who is Goober, what is he?
Inquires the peanut of the pea.
And, thus, the candle to the wick,
Why, Goober, Brightness, is a prick.
(‘III. Next Question’)
— then trades in the cheery rhythms of Edward Lear for the lewder side of Ogden Nash –
Dapper I perceive:
Clothes upon a peg:
Nothing up his sleeve,
Nothing down his leg.
(‘IV. The Gutless Wonder’)
— and lands ultimately on a touching elegy for his father:
He plays no more
Whose play was need,
The darkened score,
The broken reed.
(‘VI. Robert Roger Coulette, Musician’)
The sequence holds that limericks and epitaphs are sister arts, that mirth is adjacent to gloom, for a mixture of feeling which proves central to Coulette’s craft.
His many guises return in ‘Chicken Rampant, Bar Sinister’, which opens with ‘thirteen secret names’ and the speaker’s admission to a doctor that ‘some of my selves, / … are always out of town.’ But these are not the costumes of a latter-day Pessoa. The need to shapeshift was an heirloom from Coulette’s father, who altered his name from Rosario Ruggiero Cullotta to bury his Italian roots. (N.B. The bar sinister of the poem’s mock-heraldic title, a diagonal strip that leans left on a coat of arms, signals birth out of wedlock, the near-homophonic bastardy.)
The jewel in the crown of this first book is the seventeen-part spy thriller pastiche ‘The War of the Secret Agents’, which the editors thankfully give in full. The work is a composite of histories literary and lived: ‘they were dust’, runs the six-line anacrusis, ‘and I took that dust in hand.’ The poem proper begins with a ‘Proem’, whose title and mock-genealogical nod to [the characters’ origins in] ‘a teen-age novel / (The Motor Boys and the Gestapo)’ spoof the old long poems of Chaucer or Spenser. Nonetheless, it sets up an interest in history that Coulette bears out in his fixation on the forms of record: letters, diary excerpts, jottings on the backs of envelopes, and graffiti. The cast, as per the ‘Dramatis Personae’, includes the scholar Jane Alabastor, who is researching a book on espionage in World War II France (read: Jean Overton Fuller); Kieffer, the head of the Paris Gestapo, whose diaries, we learn in one wry footnote, betray a man beyond his passions for ‘beautiful / women, good food, and sports cars.’ The last joke of the ‘Dramatis Personae’ is the last entry: ‘T.S. Eliot, an editor.’ ‘I thought it was funny,’ explained Coulette to poet Michael S. Harper in 1982, ‘to take the high priest and describe him simply as an editor.’ The poem skips through in syllabics like a prime Thom Gunn. And, save for some garbled wordplay (‘The doctors regard me as a classic case, / and that’s the story / that I’ve doctored up for them’, ‘XIV. Wulf, At the Asylum’), Coulette never misfires.
The witty, irreverent War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems made way for loftier aims in The Family Goldschmitt, ‘an attempt’, he told Harper, ‘to deal with that question, how do those things happen? The Holocaust, how does that happen.’ The weightier subject matter does not preclude Coulette’s especial je-ne-sais-quoi. The title poem has the kind of flight from the humdrum for which Coulette ought to be better known: the landlady is a ‘blonde aura / of everything Nordic, Clairol, / And kroner, the Dowager Queen / Of Inner and Outer Chaos.’ Elsewhere, Coulette is happy to step out of frame entirely, as in ‘On the Balcony’, epigraphed to Martin Luther King Jr.:
The face in that window, blurred,
Broken, like an old moon…
My friends have assumed their shadows,
And look up at me, lingering…
The evening is hushed and ready,
Like a crowd I must speak to…
Something stirs in me,
Something I have forgotten…
It will come to me, and does,
And I am made public…
Here Coulette summons something more gnomic than he has previously managed. The sparse couplets leave room for Coulette’s lyric weave to really sing. Moments of finesse like these struggle to outrun the facts of daily life, as at the close of ‘Situational Comedy’:
Later, flatulent, stunned,
We’ll all watch TV,
And hearing the laugh track—
Those tracks are thirty years old!—
We’ll laugh as the dead laugh.
Like that of Philip Larkin, whose poetry he greatly revered, Coulette’s art happens in spite of life.
To these two published collections, Justice and Mezey added the unfinished manuscript of the follow-up, And Come to Closure, in The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette (1990). Caines and Dralyuk include from these a pair of lyrics about Thomas Wyatt (‘The Renaissance in England’ and ‘Newfangleness’), which underscores Coulette’s longstanding debts to the past: ‘If we know history,’ Coulette told Harper, ‘we’re obliged to repeat its virtues, its beauties.’ In ‘The Garden’, ‘A hummingbird whirrs by, / Towing the purple evening in his wake’, and with it nails down Coulette’s lyric gifts. Some witty epigrams (e.g., ‘Everything here is Spanish but the fly. / My name, Señor, she is Roberto Bly.’) restore a distinctly Coulettian blend of gaiety and graft.
‘Horace: IV, I’, a take on the Roman poet’s ode, is the only translation of Coulette’s that the editors include. Neither his swish Catullus 5 (‘Vivamus, mea Lesbia’) nor his clever versions of José-Maria Heredia or Philippe Jaccottet from The War Agents makes the cut. However, the editors more than make up for that oversight with the crop of discoveries from the Coulette’s papers. The best of the bunch is ‘Cry Figs’, not least for the ease of its villanelle. Some lines were probably best left in the archive: ‘The bed is waiting like a prize / With which you will reward yourselves’ from the otherwise intriguing ‘Address of the Ghosts to the New Tenants’ is surely one of them. But ‘Quake’, the book’s parting gift, is superb. Its glitzy cast of ‘Jack Donne’, ‘Raymond Chandler’ and ‘Bertolt Brecht’ hurtle towards a killer couplet tie of thwarted desire:
Alas, O children of paradise, it comes to this:
This bed thy centre was, that is a midnight mouth.
We have in Henri Coulette a new major minor poet to marvel at: his forms are exact, his humour dark and wry, and he wears his learning lightly. Credit must go to the editors and to Carcanet for recognising that Coulette is a secret better shared than kept.