Sam Hunt (poet)

Samuel Percival Maitland Hunt (born 4 July 1946, Castor Bay, Auckland) 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.

Hunt's father, a barrister, was sixty when Hunt was born (his mother was 30).

Hunt grew up at Castor Bay on the North Shore of Auckland.

He became interested in poetry because of his mother.

Hunt loved his unconventional parents and " ... early poems featuring his father remain amongst his best".

Hunt has an older brother, Jonathan, and they have an older half-brother, Alexander Hunt.

Hunt was educated at St Peter's College, Auckland which he attended from 1958 to 1963.

At St Peter's Hunt chafed under the Christian Brothers' authoritarianism.

He would later recount on numerous occasions an incident in which he was strapped for reciting a poem by James K. Baxter, which had sexual imagery, in the classroom.

He was 14 at the time.

He had a pronounced stutter and an original style of dress and deportment which did not help.

He expressed his individuality and the pressures of adolescence in poems.

Some of his earliest poems were published in the St Peter's College annual magazines.

However, Hunt was good at some sports (running and diving) and had academic success.

He has said that at the end of his sixth form year (he was 16) it was indicated to him by the headmaster of the school that he was not expected to return for the upper sixth form year.

Hunt interpreted this as a request to leave school, which he did.

In his final year at St Peter's his English master had been the poet Ken Arvidson and he had 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".

He spent brief periods truck-driving and panel-beating, but he graduated from teachers college and taught briefly in a secondary school (Mana College) before deciding, in the late 1960s, to devote himself to poetry writing.

Hunt was among the younger New Zealand poets who began to be published in the late 1960s.

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.

Arvidson endowed a poetry prize at St Peter's that was awarded to 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 Hunt, and he has acted as its judge.

In the period 1964–67, Hunt led a restless wandering life around New Zealand but particularly between Auckland and Wellington, attending university in both cities.

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.

In the 1980s Hunt with Jack Lasenby and Ian Riggir (who both lived in Paremata) published poems on an 1886 upright press obtained from the Government Printing Office.