Taking a break from Yeats and the Vampire Slayer, I reread a very odd and beautiful poem tonight.
Henri Coulette lived almost his entire life in California, dying in 1988 not far from where he was born 60 years before. He wrote metrical poetry, free verse, and syllabics. There's very little, if any, evidence that English-speakers can hear syllabics, and it is certainly difficult to write them so that the line breaks seem structural rather than arbitrary, but Coulette's best known poem, The War of the Secret Agents, consists of 119 6-line syllabic stanzas, every one with syllable counts by line of 11, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 7. That includes the Dramatis Personae (which ends "THE ABBÉ OF ARDON, a scholar. T. S. / ELIOT, an editor."!), three footnotes, and this gem:
XI. Orphan Annie: The Broken Code
8-9-12-1-9-18-5-16-5
14-20-5
3-15-20-5-9
19-1-4-15-21
2-12-5-1-7-5-14-20-6
15-18-11 …
The poem tells the story, "in different voices," of a compromised ring of Allied agents in German-occupied Paris. It's funny, heart-breaking, terrifying, and technically brilliant. Not every stanza rhymes, but just before the broken code above, Archambault, radio operator for the captured Prosper, speaks:
X. Archambault: A Suspicious Poem
The lost addresses of the soul are these:
the great estate
with mermaids at the gate
or the cold-water flat with wolves—
wherever loneliness like a disease
or a wildflower evolves—
or where like alabaster in the dark
she lies in wait
whom you would celebrate
in the exclusion of the mind,
whom you, in dreams, inchoate, know as ark,
crucible, and rind—
or where, powerful, irresponsible,
you turn away
from what the others say,
and—like a mirror come to life—
make of duplicity the single rule,
and use it like a knife.
The War of the Secret Agents was Coulette's first book; you can find it now in The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette, edited and with an introduction by Donald Justice and Robert Mezey.
9:55:17 PM 
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