Irene Blair Honeycutt has played a major role in Charlotte’s literary circles for many years. During her tenure as a faculty member at Central Piedmont Community College, she taught creative writing to countless students. In 1993, she founded CPCC’s Spring Literary Festival and served as its director for fourteen years. This festival expanded into CPCC’s Sensoria Festival, a celebration of literature and the arts. Upon her retirement in 2006, CPCC established the Irene Blair Honeycutt Distinguished Lectureship in her honor.
Besides teaching and doing community engagement work, Irene has a long record as a published poet. Her first poetry collection, It Comes as a Dark Surprise, appeared in 2001. She then brought out Waiting for the Trout to Speak (2002), Before the Light Changes (2008), and Beneath the Bamboo Sky (2017). Her fifth and most recent poetry collection, Mountains of the Moon: Poems & Pieces, came out last month from Charlotte Lit Press. I contacted Irene and asked her for more information about her new poetry collection. Irene responded by sending me a reflective piece that she titled “Thoughts on Writing Mountains of the Moon.”
Poetry surprises us with its unexpectedness. We have a dream that haunts itself into becoming a poem. We honor a deceased friend. Our words keep the departed alive. Then we turn the page. Write a poem to honor a living person who has graced our lives in a special way. We write of moments that are already past. This moment is already past tense. One day, we receive a call that stops the clocks: that person we wrote about not long ago has died unexpectedly in his pickup truck. Frozen in the mountains. But unexpectedness is about more than the dying. Or the leaving.
As Annie Dillard says, “We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed.” The heron’s wings opening to the Book of Ages. A melody pulsing beneath Serkin’s fingers and all those trout swimming. The moths. The moon. The echolocation. The orientation of stars.
A poem at a glance is like the tip of an iceberg. What is easily discernible remains on the surface. What lies beneath the layers of a poem ventures into the deep unknown. To scramble the metaphor for a moment, I said to my dentist not long ago, not thinking of poetry, but of a possible root canal: A lot of life has gone into that tooth!
The same is true of Mountains of the Moon. All the life that went into this book contains years of being taught by incredible teachers of literature that go all the way back to elementary school. It contains days of childhood when I sat inside my bamboo hut nurtured by nature and wrote tiny poems and hid them in the ground. Biblical stories and hymns—rich imagery was part of that childhood. In my professional life in Charlotte, opportunities to hear amazing poets came my way via CPCC’s Sensoria, including Robert Hass, Mary Oliver, Linda Pastan, Edward Hirsch, Mark Doty, Natasha Tretheway, Li Young-Lee, and Stephen Dunn. Too many to name. And marvelous years of mentoring students from whom I also learned came my way. The Charlotte Writers Club provided a welcoming place for leadership roles and fellowship for beginning and experienced writers.
We live in intervals. Each poem is never at the same place in the river of Time. Mountains of the Moon, my fifth, is a hybrid collection of Haibun, mini essays, dramatic, informal and experimental forms. Two of the poems were published in 2011 and 2012. The most recent in 2024. Sections vary: Motifs highlight living during the pandemic, relying on the human and the nonhuman for inspiration, joying in playing with language in new ways, mourning the loss of my dog. And the saving moon from childhood is a constant influence. I aimed to capture the unexpected, to allow intuition to lead. And then I learned anew how the poem, if we trust it, becomes wiser than the poet.
Poetry gives the breath of life to memory. I’m not the first to say that elegiac poetry is a celebration of life, not death. And I love that T. S. Eliot said “…every poem [is] an epitaph.”
I am grateful to Charlotte Lit, to all nonprofit independent presses, to the Charlotte Writers Club and Storied Charlotte for celebrating and preserving poetry for the good of us all.
For more about Mountains of the Moon, read Irene’s book page at https://www.charlottelit.org/press/mountains-of-the-moon Charlotte Lit is sponsoring a launch party for Mountains of the Moon. This event will take place on Sunday, February 16, from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. at Charlotte Hygge Coworking, 933 Louise Avenue. Copies of Irene’s collection will be available at the event to buy and have signed, but you can also purchase it online from Charlotte Lit Press. The event is free, but seating is limited so please register here.
I congratulate Irene on the publication of Mountains of the Moon, and I thank her for her many contributions to Storied Charlotte.
