One of Southern California’s most passionately engaged historians came to Los Angeles as an 8-year-old immigrant from Odesa, Ukraine.
Boris Dralyuk recalls arriving here as a child at the place that would eventually feel like home.
“I was 8, turning 9, and so I started in third or fourth grade,” says Dralyuk during a recent phone call. “I’m very proud of my immigrant upbringing.
“That’s really the great experiment of Los Angeles, of Southern California, of California, more broadly – if you’re going to blend in, this is the place to blend in. It’s the ideal melting pot.”
An award-winning poet, translator, editor and former editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), Dralyuk and his wife, Jennifer Croft – herself an author and International Booker Prize-winning translator of Olga Tokarczuk’s “Flights” – reside a bit further outside of L.A. these days: In Oklahoma, where they are both on the faculty of the University of Tulsa.
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Dralyuk has two new books coming in the next two weeks, each with a strong tie to Los Angeles as well as to National Poetry Month: He translated and wrote the introduction for “Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood” by the poet Alexander Voloshin, and he edited and wrote the introduction with Michael Caines for “Henri Coulette: New and Selected Poems.”
“Both books are coming out within a week of one another,” says Dralyuk. “They’re brother and sister.”
“Sidetracked,” published by the independent Paul Dry Books, offers a fascinating look at the poet Voloshin, a former military officer in the White Army who fought against the communists in Ukraine. The slim volume pairs Dralyuk’s essay about Voloshin’s escape from revolutionary Russia and emigration to Southern California – where he found occasional work as an extra in the movies – with a translation of the poet’s ironic “novella in verse” about “Imperial Russia’s vanquished warriors and humiliated refugees,” as Dralyuk describes it.
The Henri Coulette book may trigger a memory for longtime readers. In 2023, after stumbling across his name and spending months researching his life during my off-hours, I published a story on the lost poet of Los Angeles, Henri Coulette, which offered an overview of this Southern California writer, whose papers are held at the Huntington in San Marino.
Despite his award-winning work and decades teaching in Los Angeles – iconic L.A. poet Wanda Coleman, a former student, called him “perhaps the most important influence of them all” – Coulette had largely been forgotten.
“My sense is almost no one knows his work anymore,” Dana Gioia, former California Poet Laureate and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, told me then. “Coulette is utterly different from the general conceptions of what L.A. poets should be.”
It didn’t help that a significant number of copies of his second collection of poems were destroyed in error at the publisher’s warehouse, or that he gradually retreated from publishing and the public eye in the last decades of his life.
Then, his work went out of print for more than 36 years.
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Coulette is how I came to know Dralyuk, who had written an excellent 2015 essay about the poet for LARB and proved to be a terrific interviewee, sharing his insights and enthusiasm and connecting me with Gioia. Dralyuk’s also a delight to talk to; I was reminded of this as I re-read his quotes from the story.
Coulette “writes with a degree of coolness that we associate with the Los Angeles of a certain era, the Los Angeles of the ’40s, ’50s, into the ’60s, and there is a kind of Angeleno tone to the poems,” Dralyuk told me then. “Calm and somewhat rueful. That to me is an Angeleno sound.”
“The other thing that I think makes him a quintessentially Angeleno poet is his loneliness, his loneliness in a crowd,” said Dralyuk.
After the story had been published, I figured that was the end of it. I was wrong.
A few months ago, Dralyuk emailed me to let me know that Coulette would be coming back into print for the first time since 1990 – and that he’d noted my work in the acknowledgements along with Gioia. It was a generous thing to do.
When we spoke recently, he told me how this new collection came together.
“I have been looking for an opportunity to bring him out of the shadows for decades myself,” says Dralyuk. “I had hoped to reintroduce a few other readers to his work.”
“That brought you to me, because you discovered that I had published this when you were yourself looking into Coulette, and what you were able to bring together in your piece I think went a lot farther in raising his profile,” says Dralyuk.
“All of these things, we’re kind of chipping at an enormous stone of obscurity – a big door standing between a poet and his readers.”
A few more years went by, and Dralyuk says that he was in Texas for a poetry reading and decided to bring along a cache of Coulette’s work to read on the trip – and then “something quite serendipitous happened.”
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He got an email from Michael Caines of the U.K.’s Times Literary Supplement with the subject header: “Henri Coulette.”
“Michael found your piece, as well as my piece,” says Dralyuk, and Caines had nearly convinced a U.K. publisher to bring Coulette back into print. Was Dralyuk interested in getting involved?
Reader, he was. Caines “didn’t expect me to be as enthusiastic as I was, but that’s the kind of spirit that Coulette inspires,” says Dralyuk.
“We collaborated on the introductory essay, shooting paragraphs back and forth,” says Dralyuk, who also cites the support of Coulette’s nephew, William Patrick O’Reilly, for allowing the poems – including some previously unpublished ones – to be published.
And now it’s here. “Henri Coulette: New and Collected Poems” is out from Carcanet Classics on April 30, bringing his poems back into print after 36 years. You can order the book via the publisher online, and there are plans to have the book available on the U.S. website soon. Dralyuk and poet Ange Mlinko will host a virtual launch event on April 30.
“We were very happy with the story that we had to tell about Henri and his long streak of bad luck, both in life and after death,” says Dralyuk.
“Now it looks like Coulette has another chance to make it big.”
Remembering poet Henri Coulette, a forgotten voice of Los Angeles
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