“Accept loss forever.”

That’s precept #19 from Jack Kerouac’s Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of thirty succinct, funny, touching, profound hints for writing and living that Kerouac wrote out at the request of his friends Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

I don’t know if poet and Kerouac biographer Tim Hunt had #19 explicitly in mind as he wrote the haunting poems collected in his fifth book of poetry, Voice to Voice in the Dark. But the poems we hear there embody, for me, #19’s teaching: that to accept loss forever is, paradoxically, to embrace it in the present—to treat it as an ever-present reality, one that reveals unexpected beauty and solace, but only if we become part of that revelation.

For the revelation of the past’s present-ness is a communal beauty, one that has to be shared to become alive. Yes, we experience loss privately and painfully, each one of us; but we can’t know its beauty until, most powerfully through poetry, we can evoke loss for another, allowing the other to respond and build on what we have made of it in the present. Loss becomes a bond between us of mutual recognition of what we could never have dared to imagine and treasure otherwise.

We get a beautiful image of this creative reciprocity just from the book’s title: “Voice to Voice in the Dark.” The title is actually a direct quotation of fellow poet and novelist John Clellon Holmes’s handwritten dedication to Hunt of a poem Holmes had painfully typed out and sent to Hunt in 1987 from his hospital bed. The poem Holmes wrote is entitled “Sickbed Blues for Billie” (Billie Holiday). While Hunt doesn’t include Holmes’s poem in his book, he does provide his reply to it. Hunt’s poem is entitled “Hush Now, Don’t Explain,” itself a line from a song by Billie Holiday, and first quoted by Holmes in his original poem. But Holmes had died in 1988, long before Hunt wrote his reply. So the audience for Hunt’s reply is really us. The circle of voices courses through Billie Holliday, to Holmes, to Hunt, and now to us, Hunt’s readers. Our invited response becomes another voice in that chorus, one that, if we respond to the invitation, can enable loss to be cherished as well as lamented more broadly, more deeply.

Hunt’s own voice in this chorus is a supple, measured one. (A recording of Hunt’s reading from “Voice to Voice in the Dark” can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDzqcJIsvt8). It is a voice always conversational, but at the same time disciplined, comfortable in stanza patterns that suggest the tempo of reading: the long breaths, the shorter ones, the pausing, the silences. It’s a voice that speaks from a tradition of bardic forbears: from Hunt’s immersion in Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, and Jack Kerouac, but cooler than their voices, an effect of temperament, but perhaps even more of time and cultural change. We no longer live in an era of roving individualism, when America was still a place of romantic exploration and promise, and poets could indulge a barbaric yawp or two. But we still remember enough of that time to treasure its last echo.

Hunt begins his book with a Proem that sounds that note of quiet, unillusioned acceptance, a note that in the Proem’s course joins other notes from the past to become a chorus of metaphor:

Proem: Song of the Open Road
                       Where are you, Walt?
                       The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.
                         —Louis Simpson

At the end of the open road
the junkyard’s splintered windshields
refract the sunlight from the played out
and smashed-up: Ford, Studebaker,

even Nash Rambler or Pontiac:
the strata of sediment,
and a tear of rust like leached mascara
staining a faded fender

as if there were, once, stories,
and they might be remembered—
one hand on the wheel, a glance.
And maybe the radio bopping Carl Perkins.

Or the front seat confessional
of Did I ever tell you about
as the day’s last light
slow dances the trees into the dark.

Following this Proem, Voice to Voice in the Dark divides into three sections: “Poetry for Bread,” “American Graffiti,” and “In That Time When Time is Not Measured.”

Section I, “Poetry for Bread,” celebrates poetry’s commerce with the passing scene, as in the section’s first poem, “Vachel Lindsay Walks the Roads of Kansas Offering Poetry for Bread.”

“American Graffiti,” section II, collects Hunt’s remembrances of passing scenes in his own life while growing up in Southern California.

Finally, “In That Time When Time is Not Measured” gathers poems where remembering no longer has a past or present, as in the longest poem of the collection, “The Circle: The Veterans, called together to remember WWII, gather at the VA.”

The collection as a whole guides us through a landscape of memory that becomes less differentiated as we walk along—the boundaries between now and then slowly dissolve through time as we walk along the way that the poem we make together lays down for us.

The book’s final poem, “Coda: Relic,” not only talks us through this ongoing project, but in doing so shows us Hunt’s mastery of metaphor:

Let us pretend that this white
chip of bone is from the toe
of Saint Someone who lived some Where
Some When and was so
Saintly that we might care
if a bleached bit of bone
was indeed his body and touched
by his soul. Let us fashion
a tiny box to hold it for our
Reverence, carved and lacquered
with such devotion that we
can look upon the box and know
the truth of what is inside—and know, too,
some sanctuary of words as if Then
is still Now for always and ever,
even as they recede from each other
like a boat drifting off into a lake
with no shore as it remembers the pier,
the rock, where it was once moored.
Let us not think of that.
Let us think of the box beneath
its stone lid. Let us glory
in the play of light it draws
through the soldered fragments
of colored glass, and how, in this
story, a farther shore
welcomes home the drifting boat.

Here Hunt is no longer using images of the past to suggest the past’s own passing (as in the Proem’s likening a streak on an old fender to “…a tear of rust / like leached mascara…”) but is now inventing metaphors specific to the process of remembering itself. A treasured moment becomes a saintly bone chip we encase in a carefully crafted glass box through whose prismatic surface we gaze as Now, previously divided from Then, reverses course like a boat returning to its pier, its rock, its origin, in a perpetual recombining, remembering.

Note finally the poet’s speaking to “us” throughout. We are not, cannot be, alone on this journey. Our voices, calling to each other, even in the dark, will lead us home.

After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.