SOURCE: "Form and Genre in James Dickey's 'Falling': The Great Goddess Gives Birth to the Earth," in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 58, No. 2, May, 1993, pp. 127-54.

[In the following essay, Kirschten analyzes the significance of the stewardess in Dickey's "Falling."]

A quarter of a century ago, well before many current intellectual trends became mainstream, James Dickey reaffirmed the multicultural brotherhood of his own poetic vision with Native Americans, when, in Self-Interviews, he lamented

the loss of a sense of intimacy with the natural process. I think you would be very hard-put … to find a more harmonious relationship to an environment than the American Indians had. We can't return to a primitive society … but there is a property of mind which, if encouraged, could have this personally animistic relationship to things…. It's what gives us a personal relationship to the sun and the moon, the flow of rivers, the growth...