Sam Hunt (poet) - Poet

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 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 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, Tim, 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.