Poet Irene Blair Honeycutt – “Beneath the Bamboo Sky,” “Before the Light Changes,” “Waiting for the Trout to Speak” and “It Comes As a Dark Surprise”
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:07:21 — 61.7MB)
In this episode 90, we meet award-winning poet and teacher, Irene Blair Honeycutt, who reads from her collections, “Beneath the Bamboo Sky,” “Before the Light Changes,” “Waiting For the Trout to Speak,” and “It Comes as a Dark Surprise.”
Edward Hirsch says of “Beneath the Bamboo Sky,” that following the staggering loss of her last two siblings and several dear friends in a short period of time, Irene “bravely enters the domain of the dying and comes back with a touching testimony of loss, grief, sustenance and consolation.” These themes and Irene’s thoughts on the craft of poetry from her years of writing and teaching are the focus on this episode.
Irene starts by reading the preface from “Beneath the Bamboo Sky,” where she lets us know how she wrote to cope, and as Robert Frost suggests, to bring order to the chaos.
Learn More about Irene:
http://www.wordplaynow.com/meet_irene_blair_honeycutt/
https://awriterswindow.wordpress.com/2017/04/02/national-poetry-month-irene-blair-honeycutt/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO-c-vlvweM
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About the Author:
During her long tenure as a teacher at Central Piedmont Community College, Irene Blair Honeycutt received the Award for Excellence in Teaching and founded the Spring Literary Festival which expanded into Sensoria. Upon her retirement, the college honored her with the establishment of the Irene Blair Honeycutt Distinguished Lectureship, the Irene Blair Honeycutt Lifetime Achievement Award and a Legacy Award.
Irene is the author of four books of poetry. Her first, It Comes as a Dark Surprise (Sandstone Publishing 1992), won the New South Poetry Book Series Regional Contest. Her third book, Before the Light Changes (Main Street Rag Publishing 2008), was a finalist for the Brockman-Campbell Book Award. She received Creative Loafing’s Award for Best Contribution to the Improvement of Charlotte’s Literary Climate and was the Charlotte Writers Club’s first recipient of the Adelia Kimball Founders Award for her advocacy for writers. Irene received a Creative Fellowship from the Charlotte Arts and Science Council and a NC Arts Council Scholarship to study at the Prague Summer Writers Workshop in the Czech Republic.
Though she retired from college teaching, Irene continues to teach writing workshops, mentors individual writers who are working on their poetry, and is working on her fifth book of poetry, which may or may not be her New and Selected Poems!
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