Sam Hunt, (Samuel Percival Maitland) CNZM, QSM (born in Castor Bay Auckland on 4 July 1946) is a New Zealand performance poet.[1] He has been referred to as New Zealand's best-known poet.[2]
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Hunt 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 sixty when Hunt was born (his mother was 30). Yet Hunt loved his unconventional parents and " ... early poems featuring his father remain amongst his best".[3] Hunt has an older brother, Jonathan.
Hunt was educated at St Peter's College, Auckland which he attended from 1958 to 1963.[4] 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.[5] 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".[3] 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.[6] An annual literature competition at St Peter's College is named after Sam Hunt, and he has acted as its judge.
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. 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' ".[3]
Hunt was a prolific writer in the 1970s-1990s period and he has had something of a renaissance from 2007. In April 2009, New Zealand musician David Kilgour, formally of cult band The Clean, released an album on which poems by Hunt were reinvented as song lyrics.[7]
Hunt's friends and contemporaries included a number of well known New Zealand poets such as Denis Glover, Alistair Campbell, and James K. Baxter. Baxter's poem Letter to Sam Hunt provided advice to the young Hunt.[8]
He now lives in Kaipara in Northland[9]
Hunt's distinctive appearance - tall and rangy, usually wearing drainpipe trousers ('Foxton straights' he calls them) and open-chested shirts, with long hair curling wildly above a weathered face - is complemented by the familiar gravelly drawl that has made him one of New Zealand's most recognisable figures.[3] Almost as well-known was his long-time travelling companion, a black-and-white dog named Minstrel. "A bard in the truest sense of the itinerant minstrel, Hunt's turangawaewae is the public bar. Touring the pubs with bands of musos and poets, he is himself one of the national icons".[10] Hunt has actually become a familiar figure in New Zealand figurative art, notably in many paintings by Robin White, such as in Sam Hunt at the Portobello Pub, painted in 1978.[10]
Hunt's book sales far exceed most New Zealand poets.[3] He was awarded an Queen's Service Medal in 1986 for his contribution to New Zealand poetry. On 7 June 2010, Hunt was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the Queen's Birthday Honours List.[11]
For a comprehensive list of works, check the catalog at the National Library of New Zealand[12]