“Sometimes the what takes over so much that the how disappears. I think poetry works best when these are indistinguishable, when they keep such good balance that you don't feel you're being preached to or grasping at the abstract.”  Back in the early 1990s I had a chance to meet Robert Creeley. A friend was a graduate student in English, and he and his doctoral adviser were meeting the poet for coffee. I was invited but I couldn’t come up with a good reason to meet Creeley. “Celebrities” had lost their attraction years before. As a reporter I occasionally had to interview a writer whose work didn’t interest me. I knew how to enter that professional mode, but why waste my time and his? Creeley’s poems had always seemed anorexic, pale and underfed, barely holding on to life – scrawnier versions of William Carlos Williams’ poems. In a word, boring.   The passage quoted at the top is spoken by the Dominican-born American poet Rhina P. Espaillat in a 2015 interview. She identifies precisely the reason so much contemporary poetry is unreadably dull. The what dominates, as in strident adolescent diary entries – or poems. The how gets ignored into non-existence. Creeley’s lines are instantly forgettable. They don’t register as they grasp at the abstract.  Contrast his work with “Workshop,” a poem by Espaillat:   “‘Where have you been,’ says my old friend the poet, ‘and what have you been doing?’ The question weighs and measures me like an unpaid bill, hangs in the air, waiting for some remittance.   “Well, I’ve been coring apples, layering them in raisins and brown sugar; I’ve been finding what's always lost, mending and brushing, pruning houseplants, remembering birthdays.   “The wisdom of others thunders past me like sonic booming; what I know of the world fits easily in the palm of one hand and lies quietly there, like a child’s cheek.   “Spoon-fed to me each evening, history puts on my children’s faces, because they are the one alphabet all of me reads. I’ve been setting the table for the dead,   “rehearsing the absence of the living, seasoning age with names for the unborn. I’ve been putting a life together, like supper, like a poem, with what I have.”   Plenty of content there -- “history / puts on my children’s faces” – accompanied by plenty of how. Is it a “domestic” poem, an account of caring for family? The most important of jobs. “I’ve been setting the table for the dead.” Espaillat continues in her interview:   “Many poets today have been confused into believing that adherence to forms is for minor works. William Carlos Williams ‘blessed’ us with that idea: that if you’re really a grown-up poet you throw out the sonnets. I think he did us a great disservice.”

I owe a significant chunk of my education to the existence of paperback books. By “education” I don’t mean what I pretended to do while in the company of professors, though many of them assigned books published in soft covers. I mean self-assigned literature, beginning as a kid with all of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ various pulpy series (Tarzan, Pellucidar, Amtor, John Carter), followed by a brief but intense enthusiasm for science fiction. I recall an oddly fetishistic fondness for books published by Ace Books. I collected the paperback reprints of Mad magazine, and I remember working weekends at Kwik Kar Wash at age twelve and packing a paperback with my lunch. I worked beside an old man, Elijah Waters, who told me he never read books in paperback because they were “low-class.”  Paperbacks had precursors in the nineteenth century but they burgeoned in the 1930s in England with Allen Lane and his Penguin Books. By the nineteen-sixties, they were still inexpensive. The base-price for mass-market editions was thirty-five to fifty cents. Larger or more prestigious books – the Oscar Williams poetry anthologies, for instance, published by Washington Square Press -- might go for $1.25 or even higher, which seemed extravagant. I remember reluctantly shelling out extra money in Avallone’s Pharmacy for a paperback edition of Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower (1966). Today, paperbacks are shelved indiscriminately among my hard covers: In Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades (1960), Phyllis McGinley includes “Dirge for an Era,” a poem from the fifties, in a section called “Laments and Praises.” It begins:   “O! do you remember Paper Books When paper books were thinner? It was all so gay In that far-off day When you fetched them home At a quarter a tome . . .”   McGinley writes of a time before I was around, when paperback were cheaper still and most were popular books, mysteries and romances. They contained “never a taint of Culture.” In contrast:   Cluttering bookstore counters,     In stationer’s windows preening, The Paperbacks Now offer us facts On Tillich and Sartre And abstract artre    And Life’s Essential Meaning . . .”   McGinley has an eye for shifts in the culture and the pretensions of the middle class.   “You pack your trunk and you’re at the station But what do you find for a journey’s ration? Books by Aeschylus, books by Chaucer, Books about atom or flying saucer, Books of poetry, deep books, choice books, Pre-Renaissance and neo-Joyce books, In covers chaste and a prose unlurid. Books that explore my id and your id, Never hammock or summer-porch books But Compass, Evergreen, Anchor, Torch Books, Books by a thousand stylish names And everywhere, everywhere, Henry James.”   The rhymes “Chaucer”/“flying saucer” and “unlurid”/”your id” are good. So are, in the next stanza, “thrilling”/“Trilling” and “to read”/”seldom Gide.”

Fifteen years ago, in a blog post titled “Conservative novels,”  my friend the late D.G. Myers critiqued a “top-ten” list of that literary species assembled by a writer at The National Review. David called the list “strangely disappointing,” and it’s tough to argue with that assessment. Allen Drury? Really? As David notes: “Only three novels on NR’s top-ten list really merit their inclusion, I think: Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Shelley’s Heart, and Gilead.”   It's a matter of definitions, of course: what is meant by a “conservative novel”? And what is meant by “conservative”? There are no inarguably definitive definitions for such broad categories. David writes: “There are nearly as many definitions of conservatism as there are conservatives. The best, because the most comprehensive, belongs to Michael Oakeshott, who says conservatism is ‘not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition.’ It’s a habit of mind; it’s a natural inclination. It is a ‘propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else.’” David is quoting Oakeshott’s 1956 essay “On Being Conservative” (Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, 1962).   Without mentioning David’s post, Christopher Scalia devotes an entire book to defining and defending such novels, limiting his choices to English and American books: 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read) (Regnery, 2025). By “conservative novel,” neither David nor Scalia means political tract or ideological manifesto. Their values are literary. Scalia, a former English professor and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, gets right to the point in his introduction:   “To read a great sentence written by any of the novelists in this book is to be awestruck by a combination of music and precision, imagination and wisdom. . . . [C]onservatives should embrace the novel because it is one of the great achievements of Western culture. It is the form through which many of the most talented creative minds of the past three centuries have expressed their ideas, explored their times and places, and both reflected and formed the minds and characters of their audiences. To understand the heights of our language and culture are capable of, we must be familiar with the heritage of the novel.”   Five of the thirteen novels on Scalia’s list I have not read: Evelina (1778), Frances Burney; Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Zora Neale Hurston; The Children of Men (1992), P.D. James; Peace Like a River (2001), Leif Enger; The Index of Self-Destructive Acts (2020), Christopher Beha. The last three I had never heard of. Here are the remaining eight novels:   Rasselas (1759), Samuel Johnson; Waverley (1814), Walter Scott; The Blithedale Romance (1852), Nathaniel Hawthorne; Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot; My Ántonia (1918), Willa Cather; Scoop (1938), Evelyn Waugh; The Girls of Slender Means (1963), Muriel Spark; A Bend in the River (1979), V.S. Naipaul.   The Scott novel I haven’t read since I was a kid, and I remember little about it (I remember Guy Davenport urging me to read all of Scott.) Hawthorne I have never been able to stomach. A cloak of dullness surrounds his work for me. The rest are excellent choices. I’ve read all of them at least twice. Scalia’s bravest, most inspired choice is Daniel Deronda, in which the title character becomes a Zionist more than twenty years before the first Zionist Congress of 1897. Among its other virtues, Eliot’s novel is timely. I place it high among all the English novels of the nineteenth century, that golden age of fiction. In the final paragraph of her study The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (Encounter Books, 2009), the late Gertrude Himmelfarb writes:   “Daniel Deronda is an enduring presence in the ​‘Great Tradition’ of the novel--and an enduring contribution as well to the age-old Jewish question. Many novels of ideas die as the ideas themselves wither away, becoming the transient fancies of earlier times and lesser minds. Eliot’s vision of Judaism is as compelling today as it was more than a century ago, very much part of the perennial dialogue about Jewish identity and the Jewish question.”   In the 2010 post noted above, David Myers describes Eliot, in passing, as “an unremarked conservative novelist in her own right.” As with any list, one longs for the missing and is baffled by some of the inclusions. Scalia attaches an appendix titled “If You Liked . . . Try . . .” at the conclusion of his book, suggesting other, similar titles. This assuages somewhat my surprise and confusion at the absence of certain books and writers. The first name: Joseph Conrad. Scalia suggests Under Western Eyes (1911). No argument, though I would have nominated Nostromo (1904) in the main list. The same goes for Henry James and The Princess Casamassima (1886). I’m delighted that Scalia includes Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) among his also-rans. It’s on my short list for that mythical beast, the Great American Novel. The point of Scalia’s list is to encourage the reading of fiction among conservatives and others. In a sense, no title is wrong. Just get reading our inheritance.

Most of my preoccupations lie elsewhere but I retain a casual interest in what used to be called field biology. That is, the non-molecular, outside-the-laboratory practice of observing plants and animals, even in the middle of Houston. The motives are pleasure, wonder and aesthetic satisfaction, untainted by politics or academic dullness. I’m strictly an amateur. It’s an interest I’ve had since I was a boy, when the fields, woods and creek behind our suburban home in Greater Cleveland served as a convenient paradise.  Early on I discovered the writings of Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915), friend to Pasteur and John Stuart Mill, of all people. Out of a lifelong love of insects, Fabre blurred the dubious line separating amateur from professional. With Montaigne and Proust, he is my favorite French writer, author of the ten-volume Souvenirs Entomologiques (more than 2,500 pages, almost 850,000 words). Darwin called him an “incomparable observer,” though Fabre never accepted the theory of evolution. Marianne Moore nominated Fabre’s work for inclusion in Raymond Queneau’s Pour Une Bibliothèque Idéale (1956). I’m browsing again in The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre, the selection edited by Edwin Way Teale in 1949 I read as a kid.   Fabre was an autodidact in the age when enthusiasts with little or no formal training could do pioneering work in science and elsewhere. He never attended a university. In his essays he happily anthropomorphizes. His descriptions of field work sound like miniature dramas. They’re reminiscent of the epic battle among the ants in Walden, minus Thoreau’s portentousness. Fabre’s entomological equipment was laughably primitive and served him well. In “Wasps of the Bois des Issarts” he writes of his early insect studies (as translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos):   “A fig for Mariotte’s flak and Toricelli’s tube! This is the thrice-blest period when I cease to be a schoolmaster and become a schoolboy, the schoolboy in love with animals. Like a madder-cutter off for his day’s work, I set out carrying over my shoulder a solid digging-implement, the local luchet, and on my back my game-bag with boxes, bottles, trowel, glass tubes, tweezers, lenses and other impedimenta. A large umbrella saves me from sunstroke.”   Mark Amorose’s poem “Fabre” in the Spring 2013 issue of Modern Age sent me back to the French entomologist. Amorose takes his epigraph from Fabre’s The Life of the Fly (1879; trans. 1913):   “You rip up the animal and I study it alive; . . . you subject cell and protoplasm to chemical tests, I study instinct in its loftiest manifestations; you pry into death, I pry into life.”   “On his harmas in the valley of the Rhône— his laboratory light, florescent sky; his microscope, his unassisted eye— a patient plotter watches all alone. In what swift ambuscade does he lie prone? upon what secret doings does he spy? into what minute mysteries does he pry, this sentinel of worker, queen, and drone?   “All others lose the forest for the trees— how could they not who lay whole forests low only to squint at stumps and count their rings, as if one learns life’s truths from lifeless things? Blind analysts of death will never know what he knows who looks into life and sees.”   Without citing John Keats by name, the sonnet recalls to this reader the poet’s experience as a medical student dissecting cadavers in Guy’s Hospital in London. Fabre shows up in Richard Wilbur’s “Cicadas,” the first poem in his first collection, The Beautiful Changes (1947):   “You know those windless summer evenings, swollen to stasis by too-substantial melodies, rich as a running-down record, ground round to full quiet. Even the leaves have thick tongues.   “And if the first crickets quicken then, other inhabitants, at window or door or rising from table, feel in the lungs a slim false-freshness, by this trick of the ear.   “Chanters of miracles took for a simple sign the Latin cicada, because of his long waiting and sweet change in daylight, and his singing all his life, pinched on the ash leaf, heedless of ants.   “Others made morals; all were puzzled and joyed by this gratuitous song. Such a plain thing morals could not surround, nor listening: not 'chirr’ nor 'cri-cri.’ There is no straight way of approaching it.   “This thin uncomprehended song it is springs healing questions into binding air. Fabre, by firing all the municipal cannon under a piping tree, found out cicadas cannot hear.”   Wilbur is recalling the test performed by Fabre: Setting off cannon to see if cicadas can hear. Like true poets, they went on singing despite the boom. In his recent delightful book The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment, in a chapter titled “The Mindful Present: Seeing and Being,” Nigel Andrew speaks for me and Fabre and all observers of the natural world: “To get involved in watching butterflies, is to enter a new world, one that is rich, vibrant, abundant with life and color and energy—and in which we figure only as marginal, fleeting presences, potential threats but of no other interest. This parallel world goes on, with or without us.”