Sam Hunt (poet)



Samuel Percival Maitland Hunt, (born in Castor Bay Auckland on 4 July 1946), is a New Zealand poet, especially known for his public performances of poetry, not only his own poems, but also the poems of many other poets. He has been referred to as New Zealand's best-known poet.

Background
Hunt was born and grew up at Castor Bay on the North Shore of Auckland. His commitment to writing poetry probably came from his mother. Hunt's father, a barrister, was 60 when Hunt was born (his mother was 30). Yet Hunt loved his unconventional parents and "early poems featuring his father remain amongst his best". Hunt has an older brother, Jonathan, and both of them have an older half-brother, Alexander Hunt.

Education
Hunt was educated at St Peter's College, Auckland which he attended from 1958 to 1963. At St Peter's, Hunt's individualism came into conflict with the Christian Brother's authoritarianism and puritanism. (He has said that he was strapped at the age of 14 for reciting a poem by James K. Baxter which had sexual imagery, in the classroom. ) Life was not made easier by a bad stutter, and poems working through the tensions and fantasies of adolescence became a form of release.

Some of his earliest poems were published in the St Peter's College annual magazines. Despite problems at school, Hunt, who was a good sprinter and diver, did not leave until asked to. He benefited, in his final year, from having poet Ken Arvidson as his English master, and he obtained University Entrance. Hunt has said that "if Mr Arvidson ... had not come to the school, I would not have lasted [at St Peter's] as long as I did, and I'd just turned sixteen when I left. He introduced me to poets like Gordon Challis, who I've gone on loving ever since". Ken Arvidson endowed a poetry prize at St Peter's and this was awarded to Sam Hunt in 1963. One of Hunt's most reproduced poems is Brother Lynch, a poem about a St Peter's College teacher, Brother J B Lynch, who was sympathetic to the young Hunt. An annual literature competition at St Peter's College is named after Sam Hunt, and he has acted as its judge.

In the period 1964 to 1967, Hunt oscillated between Auckland and Wellington, attending university in both cities. Along with brief periods truck-driving and panel-beating, Hunt graduated from teachers college and taught briefly before deciding, in the late 1960s, that poetry was his vocation.

Poet
Hunt was amongst the younger New Zealand poets who began to be published in the late 1960s. He was first published in Landfall in 1967. Hunt and other young poets were interested in daily linguistic usage and in the natural units of speech rather than any special poetic language. This expressed itself in a restoration of oral aspects of poetry and a stress on performance.

Many of his poems are characteristically expressions of feeling in a single surface line which leads to a poignant close. His own experience is his single subject; moments in his life, love and its loss, and poems about his father, mother and sons. A number of Hunt's works share common themes and characters, such as the poems Porirua Friday Night and Girl with Black Eye in Grocer's Shop, both of which feature the same female character. "Everything Hunt writes is geared for personal performance: his lyrics are deliberately uncomplicated and colloquial; their traditional forms and regular rhythms allow 'the stories and myths [to be] fleshed and invested with energy and power' ". Critics have noted Hunt's "unabashed romanticism". As Hunt wrote, Romantics, so they say,/ don't ever die! (second "Song"). Hunt has been called "a kind of ["laconic"] Jack Kerouac" - whose poems (he has called them "roadsongs") are direct and simple, "surprised by their own powerful emotion". His romanticism has been compared with that of another New Zealand poet, Hone Tuwhare and their romanticism has been credited with contributing to the popularity of both poets. From the late 1960s until 1997, Hunt lived in a number of locations around the Pauatahanui inlet near Wellington. Many of the events in each dwelling are described in his verse, notably Bottle Creek (where he was joined by his famous black and white sheepdog, "Minstrel"), Battle Hill (where his older son, Tom, was born), Death's Corner (formerly the farmhouse of a Mr Death) and then back to a boatshed in Paremata. Other poems (see above) are set in Porirua nearby. In 1997 Hunt moved to Waiheke Island near Auckland. He now lives in Kaipara in Northland with his younger son, Alf.

Hunt has been a central figure in New Zealand literature since the publication of his first mature work From Bottle Creek: Selected Poems 1967–69 in 1969, published when the poet was aged just 23. He was a prolific writer in the 1970s-1990s. By focusing on the public performance aspects of poetry, Hunt was the "young poet" who most successfully reached a wider audience. Hunt pointed out how his poetry showed up the intellectuality of his contemporaries and their inclination to see popular culture as input rather than output. Much of Hunt's output is in a style similar to those of Denis Glover, Alistair Campbell, and James K. Baxter. These poets were personal friends as well as influences on Hunt. Baxter was particularly important to, and wrote many poems for, Hunt. In one of the most important of these poems, Letter to Sam Hunt, Baxter provided advice to the young Hunt. Hunt frequently delivers Baxter poems in his performances and has claimed to have committed 200 of them to memory. Many of Hunt's performance tours have been undertaken with another poet and "fellow exuberant", Gary McCormick.

Hunt has a high regard for other twentieth-century English language poets such as William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas (Hunt particularly loves Thomas' poem, In my Craft or Sullen Art, which he sees as speaking to his own mission as a poet; he has said that he sometimes gives his occupation (to Customs Officers and such) as "sullen artist"). He also loves foreign language poets such as the Italian, Salvatore Quasimodo, and the Hungarian poet Jozsef Attila (Hunt often recites Attila's poem A Hetedik or The Seventh with which he is familiar in both English and Hungarian (having heard it as a child often delivered by a Hungarian friend of his family)). Hunt also admires the work of Bob Dylan amongst many other poets. As well as his own poems, Hunt, in his performances, recites poems by all these poets, whether famous, obscure or anonymous (from sometimes unlikely sources, for example The War Cry). It is the quality of poems that is most important to him.

After a publishing gap of nearly a decade, Hunt has published in most years since 2007. In April 2009, New Zealand musician David Kilgour, of cult band The Clean, released an album on which poems by Hunt were reinvented as song lyrics. Hunt's book sales far exceed most New Zealand poets.

Icon
Hunt's distinctive appearance - tall and rangy, usually wearing drainpipe trousers ("Foxton straights" he has called them) with vests and open-chested shirts, with long hair curling wildly above a weathered face - is complemented by the familiar gravelly drawl, the rhythmic, sometimes staccato and sometimes incantatory quality of his recitation (often tapping his fingers or flicking a hand to emphasise the poetic beat) and the execution of occasional small dance-like steps of concentration. These have all made him one of New Zealand's most recognisable figures. Once, almost as well-known was his long-time travelling companion, the dog Minstrel. "A bard in the truest sense of the itinerant minstrel, Hunt's turangawaewae [i.e. 'one's own turf', literally: 'a place to stand'] is the public bar. Touring the pubs with bands of musos and poets, he is himself one of the national icons". Hunt is also a familiar figure in New Zealand figurative art, notably in paintings by Robin White, such as in Sam Hunt at the Portobello Pub, painted in 1978. In 2012, the artist Dick Frizzell completed a series of paintings of Sam Hunt poems. At the opening of the exhibition of those paintings on 7 February 2012, Frizzell said that he and Hunt had, in their respective paintings and poems, committed the ultimate "sin", the "sin of being understood".

Honours
Hunt was awarded a Robert Burns Fellowship at Otago University in 1975, and spent 1976 in Dunedin. He was awarded the Queen's Service Medal for community service in the 1985 Queen's Birthday Honours and in the 2010 Queen's Birthday Honours, he was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry. In 2012 he received a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement.

Published works
For a comprehensive list of works, check the catalog at the National Library of New Zealand


 * From Bottle Creek: Selected Poems 1967–69 (1969)
 * Bracken Country (1971)
 * From Bottle Creek (1972)
 * Roadsong Paekakariki (1973)
 * South Into Winter: Poems and Roadsongs (1973)
 * Time To Ride (1975)
 * Drunkard's Garden (1977)
 * Poems for the Eighties : New Poems (1979)
 * Collected Poems 1963–1980 (1980)
 * Running Scared (1982)
 * Approaches To Paremata (1985)
 * Selected Poems (1987)
 * Making Tracks(1991)
 * Naming the Gods (1992)
 * Down the Backbone (1995)
 * Roaring Forties (1997)
 * James K. Baxter: Poems selected and introduced by Sam Hunt (2008)
 * Doubtless: new and selected poems (2008)
 * Backroads, Charting a Poet's Life (2009)
 * Chords & Other Poems (2011)
 * Knucklebones: Poems: 1962 - 2012 (2012)