Hunt, Sam
HUNT, Sam
Nationality: New Zealander. Born: New Zealand, 4 July 1946. Family: Has one son. Awards: Young Poets award, 1971; Burns fellowship, 1976; New Zealand Literary Fund award, 1979; Queen's Service Medal. Agent: Ray Richards, Richards Literary Agency, P.O. Box 31240, Milford, Auckland, New Zealand.
Publications
Poetry
Between Islands. Privately printed, 1964.
A Fat Flat Blues (When Morning Comes). Wellington, Bottle Press, 1969.
Selected Poems 1965–1969. Wellington, Wellington Training College, 1970.
A Song about Her. Wellington, Bottle Press, 1970.
Postcard of a Cabbage Tree. Wellington, Bottle Press, 1970.
Bracken Country. Wellington, Glenburvie Press, 1971.
Letter to Jerusalem. Wellington, Bottle Press, 1971.
Bottle Creek Blues. Wellington, Bottle Press, 1971.
Bottle Creek. Wellington, Alister Taylor, 1972.
Beware the Man. Wellington, Triple P Press, 1972.
Birth on Bottle Creek. Wellington, Triple P Press, 1972.
From Bottle Zone (parts I-IV). Wellington, Alister Taylor, 1972.
South into Winter. Wellington, Alister Taylor, 1973.
Roadsong Paekakariki. Wellington, Triple P Press, 1973.
Time to Ride. Wellington, Alister Taylor, 1975.
Drunkard's Garden. Wellington, Hampson Hunt, 1978.
Sailor's Morning: 100 Selected Poems, 1966–1979. Wellington, Hampson Hunt, 1979.
Collected Poems 1963–1980. Auckland, Penguin, 1980; London, Penguin, 1983.
Running Scared. Christchurch, Whitcoulls, 1982.
Selected Poems, edited by Michael Richards. Auckland, Penguin, 1987.
Making Tracks: A Selected 50 Poems. Christchurch, Hazard Press, 1991.
Down the Backbone. Auckland, Hodder Moa Beckett, 1995.
Recordings: Beware the Man, with Mammal; Bottle to Battle to Death, Jayrem, 1983.
Other (for children)
Bow-Wow. Wellington, Alister Taylor, 1974.
Other
Roaring Forties, with Gary McCormick and John McDermott. Glenfield, Auckland, Hodder Moa Beckett, 1995.
*Critical Studies: Introducing Sam Hunt by Peter Smart, Auckland, Longman Paul, 1981; Angel Gear: On the Road with Sam Hunt by Colin Hogg, Auckland, Heinemann Reed, 1989.
Sam Hunt comments:
Lyric tradition.
* * *Sam Hunt established himself long ago as New Zealand's popular poet, barroom bard, and poet on the road. He bought himself a shack on an estuary called Bottle Creek and an old ambulance in which to travel and sleep, and he took to the roads, offering readings in schools and pubs, at literary festivals, anywhere there was an audience willing to listen and pay. His dog Minstrel, the subject of a number of his poems, went with him. From time to time Hunt had women friends, and he was married for a time and fathered a child, which provided new subjects for poems. Then he went out on the road again, the family left behind.
Hunt's literary models, at least for his mode of life, were surely Kerouac and the beat generation; beyond literature there was the whole ambience of the 1960s, the decade that saw him come to maturity. But in form Hunt's poetry was rather conservative and certainly restricted in scope. His persona was Whitmanesque, but the poetry owed more to the formal tradition of Yeats and Auden, as thi reached him through the filters of the New Zealand poets James K. Baxter and Alistair Campbell, than to any American "barbaric yawp." He was a modestly but genuinely gifted lyric poet—romantic, nostalgic, sentimental—with a penchant for confessing regrets at love lost through folly, hard drinking, and his own feckless Muse.
This person has gradually become a public figure in New Zealand. For some he is a figure of fun, forever caught in the fashions of his youth; for others he is the only notion they have of what makes a poet. He has a sort of gabbling charm, somewhat patrician despite the road persona, and a gravelly and stammering but curiously resonant delivery. Schoolteachers, worried about the difficulty of making poetry acceptable to classes with no aptitude for it, bring him along to show that poetry is not difficult but has a human face. Pubs engage him because he has a following, even if there are people who cannot always be relied on to stop talking when he reads.
Some will argue that anything that makes poetry more widely known and enjoyed is to be applauded; others feel that Hunt's traveling circus debases poetry. It remains to be seen what this mode of life has done to Hunt or, more precisely, to his poetry. He talks on the radio (whether tongue in cheek or not is not clear) about his "road manager." Sometimes he seems to want to give the impression that he is making a lot of money by his trade, though that seems unlikely. He frequently expresses his disdain for critics who favor obscurity and intellectual pretensions over the poetry of the heart. But his own poetry neither grows nor develops. By the 1990s Hunt appeared to be stuck in a groove of sentiment and a lack of technical range.
—C.K. Stead