WINDSOR LOCKS, Conn., Oct. 19–A 29-year-old stewardess fell 1,500 feet to her death tonight when she was swept through an emergency door that suddenly sprang open on an Allegheny Airlines plane. – NYT

Francoise de Moriere tragically passed away in 1962. A couple news articles are to be expected. You know what’s not? An epic poem sexualizing her passing. That’s what James L Dickey did. Researching the event brought tons and tons of references to the poem; and none to de Moriere.

This is what Dickey says about his poem:

She undresses on the way down, because since she’s going to die she wants to die, as she says, “beyond explanation.” She would rather be found naked in a cornfield than in an airline uniform. So she takes off everything, is clean, purely desirable, purely woman, and dies in that way.

Libby Larsen was also inspired and dedicated a piece to de Moriere. It seems she was as inspired by Dickey’s work as by the tragedy:

In his poem, Dickey chooses to take a commercial point of view. A writer of Coca-Cola commercials himself, Dickey was a master of the advertising image in poetic form. His unnamed woman, Dickey’s vision of the 1960’s perfect magazine image and an object of sexual desire for the farmers below her, quietly, calmly practices flying, observes the topography below her, imagines the possibility of landing in water, sheds her clothes, and when she hits the ground, she lives for long enough to consider her own death. Neon Angel is a piece for Francoise de Moriere, and a piece about time, point of view, and brutality. Sound collides with sound, time collides with itself, and Francoise de Moriere is given back her scream.

Thanks, Mr Dickey for telling us how a woman should die and still be a woman; be pure, and whatnot.