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“While preparing these remarks, I was reading up a little on Magee—by which I mean, why hide the fact, that I was reading his Wikipedia entry—when I noted a section called ‘Sources of Inspiration for
High Flight
.' ‘Sources of Inspiration' is an understatement, a euphemism; if Magee were a student of mine and showed me a poem with this number of ‘sources,' I'd either say it was a work of collage or an act of plagiarism. The last line of ‘High Flight'—‘And touched the face of God'—also concludes a poem by a man named Cuthbert Hicks, a poem that was published three years before Magee's in a book called
Icarus: An Anthology of the Poetry of Flight
. Hicks's poem ends: ‘For I have danced the streets of heaven, / And touched the face of God.' What's more,
Icarus
contains a poem called ‘New World' by one G.W.M. Dunn, which includes the (unfortunate) phrase ‘on laughter-silvered wings,' which Magee stole for the second line of ‘High Flight.' Moreover, the penultimate line of ‘High Flight'—‘The high, untrespassed sanctity of space'—sounds an awful lot like a line from a poem in
Icarus
by someone known by the initials C.A.F.B., ‘Dominion over Air,' a poem that had previously been published in the
RAF College Journal
: ‘Across the unpierced sanctity of space.' Reagan's unattributed quotation provided by Noonan was taken from a poem that was cobbled together by a young poet out of an anthology of other young poets enthralled by the power of flight, which cost many of them their lives—unless someone made this all up on Wikipedia, which is possible; I didn't have time to track down a copy of
Icarus
. I find this less scandalous than beautiful: a kind of palimpsestic plagiarism that moves through bodies and time, a collective song with no single origin, or whose origin has been erased—the way a star, from our earthly perspective, is often survived by its own light.

“I want to mention another way information circulated through the country in 1986 around the
Challenger
disaster, and I think those of you who are more or less my age will know what I'm talking about: jokes. My brother, who is three and a half years older than I, would tell me one after another as we walked to and from Randolph Elementary that winter: Did you know that Christa McAuliffe was blue-eyed? One blew left and one blew right; What were Christa McAuliffe's last words to her husband? You feed the kids—I'll feed the fish; What does NASA stand for? Need Another Seven Astronauts; How do they know what shampoo Christa McAuliffe used? They found her head and shoulders. And so on: the jokes seemed to come out of nowhere, or to come from everywhere at once; like cicadas emerging from underground, they were ubiquitous for a couple of months, then disappeared. Folklorists who study what they call ‘joke cycles' track how—particularly in times of collective anxiety—certain humorous templates get recycled, often among children. When the IRA blew up a fishing boat with Admiral Mountbatten on it in 1979, the year of my birth, people told the same dandruff joke. When an actor named Vic Morrow died in a helicopter crash in 1982, there was the joke again—head and shoulders. (Procter & Gamble developed the shampoo in the 1950s.) The
Challenger
joke cycle, which seemed to exist without our parents knowing, was my first experience of a kind of sinister transpersonal syntax existent in the collective unconscious, a shadow language to Reagan's official narrative processing of the national tragedy. The anonymous jokes we were told and retold were our way of dealing with the remainder of the trauma that the elegy cycle initiated by Reagan-Noonan-Magee-Hicks-Dunn-C.A.F.B. (and who knows who else) couldn't fully integrate into our lives.

“So at the beginning of my story of origins is a false memory of a moving image. I didn't see it live. What I saw was a televised speech that wasn't written by anyone, but that, through its rhythmic structure, was briefly available to everyone; the next day I went to school and another powerfully unoriginal linguistic practice enveloped me, an unsanctioned ritual of call-and-response that was, however insensitively, a form of grieving. If I had to trace my origins as a poet to a specific moment, I'd locate it there, in those modes of recycling. I make no claims for ‘High Flight' as a poem—in fact, I think it's a terrible poem—and Ronald Reagan I consider a mass murderer. I don't see anything formally interesting about the
Challenger
jokes, I can't find anything to celebrate there; they weren't funny even at the time. But I wonder if we can think of them as bad forms of collectivity that can serve as figures of its real possibility: prosody and grammar as the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all. Thank you.”

I thought the applause for my remarks was enthusiastic, but I might well have been mistaken, because almost none of the questions in the ensuing conversation was addressed to me; the other two writers on the panel were much better known. I sat in a modernist leather chair on the stage at Columbia's School of the Arts, unable to see the audience clearly because of the tungsten lights, a distinguished professor of literature moderating, and mainly listened to the distinguished authors—so distinguished I'd often thought of them as dead—talk about the origins of their genius. (Would you believe me if I said that one of the distinguished authors was the same South African man I'd observed from across the room at Bernard and Natali's fifteen years before?) There were the usual exhortations to purity—think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form—exhortations poets don't have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.

But at the elegant dinner the distinguished professor had arranged for us after the panel, all the initial small talk was about money: had you heard about X's advance, how much money Y received when her aggressively mediocre book was optioned for film, and so on. After two quick glasses of Sancerre, the distinguished male author started holding forth, periodically tugging at his salt-and-pepper beard, his signature gesture, moving from one anecdote about a famous friend or triumphant experience to another without pausing for the possibility of response, and it was clear to everyone at the table who had any experience with men and alcohol—especially men who had won international literary prizes—that he was not going to stop talking at any point in the meal. Unless he dissects, I thought. When a young Latino man tried to refill his glass of water from a pitcher, the distinguished male author snapped in Spanish, without looking at the man, that he was having sparkling water, and then switched back into English without missing a beat. The distinguished professor was sitting immediately across from the distinguished male author and seemed more than happy to receive his logorrhea; a younger woman—probably also an English professor, but too young to be distinguished—was sitting beside him, smiling bravely, realizing her evening was doomed.

I was on the other side of the table sitting across from the distinguished female author, enjoying how the crispness and lightness of the wine had a rightness of fit with the restaurant's pear-wood paneling and bright terrazzo floors. Seated to my right was a well-dressed graduate student about my age who was plainly starstruck by the distinguished female author, perhaps the subject of his dissertation. To the distinguished female author's left was her husband, probably also distinguished in some way, who had the look of many husbands: eyebrows perpetually raised a little in a defensive mask of polite interest, signifying boredom. I was unsure if I should say
gracias
or thank you to the man refilling my water glass. Even here, where a meal for seven would cost at least a thousand dollars, much of the work was done by a swift underclass of Spanish-speaking laborers. I thought of Roberto, of his terror of Joseph Kony. I tried to picture, as I looked around the restaurant, those towns in Mexico in which almost all of the able-bodied men were gone, employed now in New York's service industry.

“I enjoyed your story in
The New Yorker
,” the distinguished female author said to me. It seemed that the story—which was in part the result of my dealing with the reception of my novel—had been much more widely read than the novel itself.

“Thank you,” I said. And then I said, although I had only read one of her books and it hadn't made much of an impression on me, “I've long been an admirer of your work.” She smiled with only the left side of her mouth in a way that doubted the statement; I found the expression winning.

“Do you have a brain tumor?” she asked. I was impressed less with her frankness than with the fact that it appeared she'd actually read the story.

“Not that I know of.”

“Is it part of a longer work?”

“Maybe. I think I might try to make it into a novel. A novel in which the author tries to falsify his archive, tries to fabricate all these letters—mainly e-mails—from recently dead authors that he can sell to a fancy library. That idea was the origin of the story.”

“Why does he need the money? Or is the money what he wants?”

“I think it's more a response to his own mortality—like he's trying to time-travel, to throw his voice, now that he's dealing with his own fragility. It starts off as a kind of fraud but I imagine he might really get into it, might really feel like he and the dead are corresponding. Like he's a medium. But you wouldn't know, even at the novel's end, if he really planned to sell the letters or if he was just working on an epistolary novel of some sort. And he could meditate on all the ways that time is monetized—archival time, a lifetime, etc.” I was trying to sound excited about the project I was describing, but felt, despite the wine, dispirited: another novel about fraudulence, no matter the bruised idealism at its core.

I ordered an appetizer of charred shrimp with puntarelle, whatever that was, and seared scallops for my main course. I was told by the waiter that my choices were excellent. The distinguished female author said she'd also have the scallops, and that felt somehow like a gesture of fellowship.

The graduate student asked the distinguished female author what she was working on. “Absolutely nothing,” she said, with utter seriousness, and, after a brief interval of silence, we all laughed. Then she said to me, “Whom would he correspond with, what dead people?” The frustrated graduate student—he didn't want to hear more about me—and the bored husband tried to make conversation. I could hear the distinguished male author droning on in the distance.

“Primarily poets, I guess. Poets I corresponded with a little—mainly for the magazine I used to edit and that the protagonist will have edited—and whose tone I know how to imitate. Robert Creeley comes to mind.”

“I used to know Creeley pretty well.” She sipped her wine. “Would you include real correspondence, too—I mean, do you have actual letters you received that you'll insert into the fiction?”

“No,” I said. “Almost all the correspondence about the magazine was e-mail, and I had a different e-mail account for much of that time. I never printed anything. What I do have is boring, logistical.”

“I could write you a letter for it—he could falsify one from me but I could write it.”

“That would be great.” I loved the idea.

“You should really try it.” I thought she meant try to write the novel, but: “You should try to pass off letters you've written to an archivist. That's how you'd know if the fiction was plausible.” I laughed.

“I'm serious. I can put you in touch with the appraiser I worked with when I thought about selling my papers to the Beinecke.”

“I don't have the courage,” I said. Was she serious? One waiter materialized to refill our wine, another placed my appetizer before me. Puntarella was a green with dandelion-shaped leaves.

“Well, put the stuff about the shuttle in there somehow. I liked that. When you talked about the kids watching the explosion, the nervous laughter—that reminded me of something I hadn't thought of for a long time, but that I used to think about constantly.”

“These are amazing,” I said, referring to the shrimp, which were. “You've got to try a bite,” I said, and she reached across the table with her fork.

“When I was in the first year many centuries ago, our teacher, Mrs. Meacham, lost her daughter.” I guessed first grade was called “first year” in Britain. “Nobody told us, of course. We had a substitute for a few days, were informed that Mrs. Meacham was mildly ill, and then there she was again, maybe a little more distant than usual, but basically unchanged. It must have been a week or two after she'd been back, we were doing recitation exercises, and she called on me to read a passage from the textbook—I remember it as a passage from the Bible, but that seems unlikely. Anyway, she called on me and I read a few lines and then she stopped me. She looked straight at me and she said, her voice frighteningly calm: ‘You look just like my daughter, Mary.' I remember the name clearly. The class was completely silent, we'd never heard Mrs. Meacham say anything off script. Then she said, slowly: ‘My dead daughter, Mary. You look just like my daughter, who is dead.' She said it like it was some sort of grammatical demonstration.” The graduate student was trying to listen while still facing the husband, who was talking about a recent trip to India. Our glasses were unobtrusively refilled. “We were all shocked,” she continued. “I remember looking down at my book and feeling tremendous shame, as though I'd been reprimanded. Then I looked up at Mrs. Meacham, who was staring at me, and I heard this terrible laughter.”

“Laughter?”

“
My
laughter. I heard it before I recognized it as issuing from my body. It was completely involuntary. It was a profoundly nervous response. For a few seconds only I was laughing, and then everybody started laughing. Everybody in the classroom erupted into loud, hysterical laughter, and Mrs. Meacham, in tears, fled the room. And as soon as she fled the room, the laughter stopped. It stopped all at once, like a disciplined orchestra that has received a sign from the conductor. And we just sat there in silence, ashamed and confused.” She took another bite of my appetizer, which I hadn't touched while she'd been speaking.