Henri Coulette; Acclaimed Poet, Cal State L.A. English Professor

Henri Coulette, a nationally recognized poet who once wrote that he took “pride in demonstrating . . . traditional meter, syllabics, accentuals,” has died at the age of 60, a spokesman for Cal State Los Angeles said this week.

The alumnus of and professor of English at Cal State L.A. died of apparent heart failure March 26.

After getting his undergraduate degree at Cal State L.A. in 1952, Coulette earned a doctorate at the University of Iowa where he lectured before returning to Cal State L.A. in 1959 as a member of the English department.

His first book of verse, “The War of the Secret Agents” published in 1965, won critical acclaim and brought him the James D. Phelan Foundation Award given each year to a California artist and the Lamont Poetry Prize for the best first volume of poetry published in America.

His second collection, “The Family Goldschmitt” was published in 1971 and was praised in a Times review by poet Jascha Kessler for “compressing unbearable depths of emotion, of sheer pain, into every phrase and fashioning a level, conversationally flat tone, to convert the tension, the agony, into supportable thought.”

Coulette was at work on his third book of verse at the time of his death.

Coulette, who is survived by a nephew and two nieces, was named Cal State’s Outstanding Professor of the Year in 1970.

Over the years his work has appeared in several publications, among them Paris Review, Mademoiselle, the New Yorker and New Criterion. He also was host critic for “Poetry Chronicle” heard over radio station KPFK.

A memorial service has been scheduled at Pomona College’s Crookshank Hall at 8 p.m. Monday.

In the anthology “Contemporary Poets,” Lawrence Russ praised the force and simplicity of Coulette’s work and cites this short example, entitled “Robert Roger Coulette, Musician:

He plays no more

Whose play was need,

The darkened score,

The broken reed.