The memories of poet Sam Hunt that are scattered across New Zealand are wildly variable, writes Seven Sharp reporter Julian Lee.
My first memory of Sam Hunt was as a child in the early 1990s. He was on a Vogel’s ad. I remember a delightful older man with tousled windswept hair, reciting poetry with a charming roguish monotone.
My parents were big fans. My dad, in particular, was a logophile, a lover of words. And who knows a word better than Hunt? Like many, they never met him even if they felt like they had. But many did meet him.
Some would have seen him recite poetry in pubs with his open shirt and Foxton straights, doing something which seemed unthinkable at the time and still is, in a way – drawing crowds in a country where the main form of entertainment is sport.
Kids remember him coming to their school and reciting, among other things, his Bow Wow poems.
Online, Daniel said he remembers Hunt coming into his butcher’s shop to get his dog Minstrel a bone. According to Daniel, he said he was but a poor poet and paid him in verse. Then saying he had to be somewhere but wasn’t sure where yet, he tipped his hat and left.
Glenis said she knows a woman who Hunt asked out on a lunch date. He took her to the supermarket for the free tasting samples.
These sorts of stories cover off most New Zealanders. Anecdotes, chance meetings, hearsay. On a far grander scale, Hunt’s words have inspired some of our best artists. Robin White’s Sam Hunt at the Portobello Pub, Dick Frizzell’s Beware the Man. Our leaders over the years have decorated him with a range of awards and accolades including a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
Barry Crump, Robert Muldoon (they shared the same girlfriend), James K. Baxter (more on that later) and Edmund Hilary. They all had something to do with Hunt.
Hunt would abhor the mention of all these names – during our interview, he made his feelings quite clear on name-dropping and the feelings weren’t good.
And as for that interview. Well, I’ve interviewed CEOs, politicians, and celebrities without the slightest nerve. But this was Sam Hunt. I felt like it was my first day on the job as a journo again, many years ago when I was covering the Plimmerton School Fair in Porirua.
A pleasing voice message
I don’t know where I first got the idea to call Hunt — it was too long ago.
Sometime around 2020 I tracked him down and got his voice message – probably the most pleasing voice message I’d ever heard. Something simple and standard along the lines of “I’m not here right now…,” but the way he read it was sublime.
Hunt got back to me. But Covid had either just hit or was about to hit so everything got tied up. I tried again about a year later, this time he had the virus. Eventually, three years on, we concocted a plan to meet.
We talked several more times before I went to Northland. We talked about life, family, and poetry. Hunt talks in verse – his own, and others. And especially Bob Dylan’s. Even when he’s talking in “prose”, which I suppose is what you’d call a normal conversation, it sounds like he’s reciting. He speaks in meter.
The ad-lib directions to his house were worthy of being written down forever: “Down a long drive is the house where I live. I live there. It is my home.”
I wasn’t surprised at all to see his abode. A two-storied thing of indiscernible age and style overlooking one of those still, shallow sub-tropical Northland inlets surrounded by small scrub. But “two-storied” and “overlooking an inlet” implied it was fancy. It wasn't. I don’t know architecture. It was brown and I think it had a tin roof.
As the cameramen Dave and Sam unpacked their gear, I lit a cigarette. Hunt's friend Caroline was downstairs and told me, "don’t worry about smoking it outside, bring it inside". I mounted the stairs and came out into a large attic-like space overlooking the Kaipara Harbour. Books and records were everywhere. A bouquet of scents, sea vapours and other kinds of vapours, smelled sweet.
And there he was, standing right there – older than the man in the Vogel’s ad. Hair still wonderfully dishevelled, now grey. A crisp white collared shirt, with only a fraction of the buttons done up – very much in keeping with a decades-long consistency of style.
Someone once told me that a man wearing a collared shirt with more than two buttons undone is known to have “holiday buttons”. If that’s the case, Hunt's on permanent vacation. And with a small glass of red in his hand, it was confirmed.
Strangely feeling far too much at home I slumped straight into one of his armchairs like I lived there. His sense of familiarity overcame my sense of sensibility in a stranger’s house. I also hadn't taken my shoes off. He rebuffed me immediately for smoking inside. Confused, I went to put it out. Caroline told me not to worry, so I didn’t.
We began to talk as Dave and Sam set up.
Hunt told me to stop asking questions because a broadcaster once told him to save all the questions for the actual interview. I also know this fact – because in television, if you ask an important question when the camera is off you have to ask it again when the camera is on, otherwise it didn’t happen. And when you have to ask it again the interviewee has to repeat the answer which almost always lacks the energy and originality of the first answer and it doesn’t make good telly.
Layers of chipper self-delusion
But I couldn't help myself — it was more fun this way.
The cameras switched on. I led with a stupid question. It was something rambling about the New Zealand vernacular and what it’s like to structure it into verse. In fact, it wasn't even a question, which Hunt immediately pointed out. As he correctly noted, there was no verb. No doing word. So how could it be a question?
Immediately losing mental balance, I stumbled on with an over-analysis of his poems, the kind of thing almost any artist dislikes. I misquoted him and accused him of a verse he never wrote.
I asked him about New Zealand. I proposed to him that New Zealand is a country of sadness but we hide it under layers of chipper self-delusion and I felt that came through in his verse. He quoted Baxter’s Ballad of Calvary Street:
“Where two old souls go slowly mad, National Mum and Labour Dad.
Finally getting a grip, I asked him some good questions. I asked him how he came up with his poems. He said the poems find him, of course. They come from the sky. He read me one of his new poems, as yet unpublished:
“Some nosy number asked so which one’s your sweetheart? I said I don’t rightly know could be the one with the halo
We talked about his health. It’s not great. He’s 77 years old and he said he had a dream when he was 7 about being 77. He still has a recurring dream that he’s walking down a road.
We discussed A Mangaweka road song:
“They ask me why I travel and never settle down. I lose two games of pool And hitch-hike out of town.
We talked about lots of things. We talked about his childhood, his parents and his tree hut. We even talked politics – he said he’s never voted. Neither have I. But he has opinions on certain people in politics and that it’s important to have an opinion. He quoted what I think is Samuel Johnson, “a man not interested in politics is not interested in life.”
I reluctantly brought up the idea of fate. I mean, how couldn’t I? The man’s been writing poems since childhood.
The first one he wrote when he was 7 years old. It’s called Christmas 1953:
“Climb up the cliff path to the pines where through their needles salt winds blow and far below the fish and ocean go and down the cliff path home bring a lone Christmas tree and by the beach let it in warm winds grow.
Hunt said he doesn’t mind the idea of fate. In fact, he brought up a story from his school years. A story that never made it to air, for reasons you’ll see.
The story hangs on Hunt reciting a certain poem. And, depending on who you ask, it’s probably one of New Zealand’s most controversial poems. It’s open to interpretation, of course.
Hunt told us about his rough time at high school, St Peter’s in Auckland, from which he was eventually expelled. He said he had many difficulties there. St Peter’s is a Catholic high school and, being a Catholic high school in the early 1960s, all the teachers were men of the cloth.
He tells us of a time when one of the teacher-priests asked the students if any of them knew a poem by heart. Hunt, of course, reckoned he knew about a thousand already at this point.
So he stood up and recited a poem by James K. Baxter called Evidence At The Witch Trials.
The perfect poem for the situation, as always with Hunt. A rebellious teenage boy, in a place where he didn’t fit in, made a statement.
Hunt was sent to the principal’s office. The principal asked him why he’d been sent there. He told him to recite a poem. The principal asked him to tell him the poem, so he had to commit the same sin twice. The principal strapped him.
But Hunt explained the strapping in a way that felt like the principal was just going through the motions of being a principal.
He said about the principal: “I think he recognised what the hell was going on.”
That the principal got Hunt and got his point. An unspoken understanding that they were both just characters acting their roles in a play that neither had any choice to be in.
Hunt didn't say any of this of course – I was reading between the lines.
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