EQMM regular Joseph Goodrich gives us a fascinating history of our magazine’s long tradition of publishing poetry. Be sure to read Joseph’s latest poem “Two Men Discuss Murder on a Rainy Night Near Patchin Place” in [our Nov/Dec issue, on sale now!]

EQMM is no stranger to poetry. Selecting an issue at random—May 1977, which featured stories by Michael Gilbert, Thomas Walsh, and E. X. Ferrars, among others—the reader finds not one, not two, not three, not four but five examples of verse. Light verse, I should add; less T. S. Eliot than Phyllis McGinley, these and other poems published in the magazine over the years leavened with humor the darker tales surrounding them. Poems continue to appear in EQMM, albeit in a darker, less humorous register.

Poets are no stranger to mysteries. Edgar Allan Poe—the patron saint of the genre—was, of course, a major American versifier. C. Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate of England from 1968 until his death in 1972, published a series of elegantly written mysteries under the nom de plume Nicholas Blake. Day-Lewis was a friend and colleague of W. H. Auden, whose fearsome appetite for the form was revealed in an essay titled “The Guilty Vicarage.” Auden put his cards on the table:  “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol.” Left-wing poet Kenneth Fearing added at least one classic to the canon—The Big Clock. Julian Symons not only authored dozens of novels and the ever-controversial history of the genre Bloody Murder but founded the magazine Twentieth Century Verse in 1937 and published two volumes of poetry in the late 1930s and early 40s. Frederic Dannay, founding editor of EQMM, was a passionate collector of volumes of poetry (first editions only, please!) and composed but never published a volume of his own.

And how could I neglect the fact that EQMM’s editor Jackie Sherbow is an accomplished poet who’s written so cogently of the links between poetry and the mystery on this very blog?

I make no claim for a seat at their table, but on occasion I’m seized by the poetic impulse—a sharp apprehension of some sort that crystallizes in verse. “Two Men Discuss Murder on a Rainy Evening Near Patchin Place” is the result of one of those impulses.

The last two lines of Archibald MacLeish’s famous Ars Poetica spring to mind at this juncture:

A poem should not mean

But be.

Explanation can take the mystery out of a thing; but if it has any kind of life to it—and I hope that “Two Men” has—perhaps some of the mystery still adheres after the author’s held forth. The desire to pay tribute, to acknowledge the work of others, is part of the ludic aspect of writing.

“Two Men” is a tip of the hat to poet and artist Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972). Loosely affiliated with the Beat Generation—though a generation older than Kerouac and Ginsberg—Patchen mostly labored in obscurity. A spinal injury in his twenties ultimately left him bedridden for the last decade of his life. He was taken care of by his wife, the steadfast and devoted Miriam, to whom so many of his books are dedicated.

I’ve “borrowed” the Patchens for my poem. “Kenneth” is the man the murderous duo are waiting for. Like his namesake, this Kenneth writes and paints and is married to a woman named Miriam. Like his namesake, he’s had more than his fair share of trouble.

You’d be correct in assuming that the poem’s location—Patchin Place, a cul-de-sac in Greenwich Village that has counted the novelist Djuna Barnes; John Reed, the journalist and author of Ten Days That Shook the World; and Marlon Brando among its residents—suggested Patchen as the putative victim.

There’s an even stronger connection to Patchen. The first poem of his I read was included in Dilys Winn’s Murder Ink: The Mystery Reader’s Companion (1977). It’s titled “The Murder of Two Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon-colored Gloves” and consists of fifteen words:  “Wait” repeated fourteen times, followed by the word “NOW.”

In 1958 Patchen recorded some of his poetry accompanied by the Chamber Jazz Sextet. Such pairings of “beatnik” writers with jazz artists were popular in those days. Patchen performs, among other poems, “The Murder of Two Men.” You can hear it here.

I hope you’ll give Patchen a read—or a listen. Or both.

The connection between poetry and the mystery, what the Private “I” and the Private Eye have in common, was neatly described by Fred Dannay in his introduction to Poetic Justice, an anthology of crime tales composed by poets from (as the front cover of the 1967 New American Library edition puts it) Chaucer to Dylan Thomas. “Poets,” Dannay observed, “bring order out of chaos. Detectives, in resolving mysteries, also bring order out of chaos. Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other. Therefore poets are detectives, and detectives are poets. Q.E.D.”

Both poet and detective are searching for the truth. Both, with any luck, find it.