Poetry Archives: James Dickey’s “Falling”
October always reminds me of the poem “Falling,” by James Dickey, which once inspired a really terrific Halloween costume that no one appreciated. I had spent hours creating it: a panicked stewardess, hair spiked straight up above her head, tie floating in the same upward direction, uniform beginning to be disheveled. You know:
Out finding herself with the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat
The undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something
That no one has ever been and lived through screaming without enough air
Still neat lipsticked stockinged girdled by regulation her hat
Still on
For clarity I pinned a copy of the poem to my back, but it’s a long one, and Halloween parties tend to be dark, social affairs during which the reading of a poem is less important than jello shots.
“Falling” is a poetic recounting of the true tale of an Allegheny Airlines stewardess who was sucked out of a plane’s emergency exit and fell to her death in October, 1962. It appeared in The New Yorker in February of 1967 (you can read it in full on the Poetry Foundation site, and in our digital edition, if you’re a subscriber).
I love that Dickey takes a spoonful of real news and expands it into a rich, evocative poem. In the news story, the stewardess is a victim, the sky the context, her death the headline. In the poem, the stewardess is a philosopher, an animal, and a goddess, a sexy, thoughtful, living thing, experiencing the last spontaneous and frightening moments of her life with daring attentiveness. It’s a poem about imagination: Dickey using his to save the stewardess from her weird-news-of-the-week tomb, and the stewardess using her own to retain hope—through a water landing or a life-saving metamorphosis—of survival. Death is an inevitability, though it must always come as a surprise to the living; Dickey accentuates this with chopped-up lines that make each word seem half-accidental.
In retrospect, it was a terrible Halloween costume. My reliance on the text was cheating, my reluctance to flip my hem over my waistline and adhere to Halloween’s most cherished custom—the “sexy” whatever—rendered the costume boilerplate. And in the end, what’s so terrific about “Falling” is that, in spite of the gruesome event that inspired it, it’s not really that scary.
(Image via Ultraswank.)
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