Michele Hewitson Interview: Sam Hunt

Sam Hunt's <i>Backroads</i> covers friendships and his dog, but not girlfriends. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Sam Hunt writes in his new book, Backroads, that even as an 8-year-old boy, "I always imagined I would live as a poet".

When we arrive at his house, on the edge of the Kaipara Harbour, the poet is standing barefoot, in the wind, brandishing, triumphantly, a single sock. Life as a poet, at the age of ... "69!" He isn't 69. "I'm not either! I just thought: 'What would it be like to be 69?' Ha, ha, ha. I'm the new 69. I was 63, the last time I fronted up to a calendar."

I thought he might have genuinely forgotten. "No." He started talking again and spilled his wine. "I'm dribbling and I'm only, what am I? 69! And I just wet my pants." I mopped up. "Thank you." We have to look after the elderly. He clapped his hands, with glee, and said, "That's right. We tend to get forgetful and fidgety. So where was I?"

The romantic notion of living as a poet. "I don't know what I meant. Well, yes, I did, I had a good idea, actually. I shouldn't be dismissive of that. I had a romantic notion." The domestic life of the poet at 63. The sock belongs to Alf, his 12-year-old son, who lives with him during the week. The poet is delighted to have found it because, as he points out, you never find a missing sock.

I'd imagine that the day-to-day life of the poet is not all that romantic. "I think it is. If you wrote a poem. Everything is right, when you write a poem." Writing a poem makes him "more than happy. When it's a good poem. I wrote one yesterday ... Can I read you my new poem?"

He is a gracious host. He makes tea for me and coffee for him then forgets he's having coffee. He takes a gulp, looks utterly astounded. "Oh. Coffee. That's right. That's why it tastes ... I was expecting tea!"

He gave himself a surprise. "It's a good thing to still give yourself a surprise."

If you ask to use the loo, he doesn't, as most people do, point you in the right direction. He comes in with you. "Oh, here we are. Here's a ... towel." What are those pills? "To keep my heart going." What's wrong with his heart? "I had a heart transplant some years ago." Did he? "Or was it the time I was stabbed? I can't remember. No, no." He gave a much ruder, blokier, but still jokey explanation of the purpose of the pills to the photographer, when he thought I couldn't hear. "I didn't like to say that to her."

He is a gentleman. I'd idiotically brought him a Sally Lunn. He tried to make us take it away, because he wouldn't eat it. That might have been a bit rude. It was a beautiful Sally Lunn. He said he'd contemplate it, before not eating it. What nice manners he has. He wandered over to a collection of bottles and said, "Would you like a little something?"

By that stage, we'd already had a little something. He said, "Oh, are you still interviewing?" I said, "No. I don't think I am," meaning I'd given up on that idea some time ago.

The poet got up to go outside with a cushion stuck to his bottom. He recited more poems. A glass got smashed. He was terribly kind. "Are you all right?" he asked. "Michele will say I'm being superstitious [I would: he'd told me earlier that he says Hail Marys, despite being a lapsed Catholic, before setting off on his road tours], but, in fact, breaking a glass is good luck."

I'd have taken a bottle with me but I wasn't sure whether he was drinking, because sometimes he is and sometimes he isn't. Before we had a little something I'd been asking about the drinking and he said, "I'm not drinking now. Well, I'm drinking coffee and later on I'll probably have a glass of wine. In a perfect world, I would never drink, but it ain't a perfect world."

He has had times when he hasn't drunk; he's been "run over" by the drink, sometimes. "Oh, shit yeah. No question. It's a dodgy friend, the old booze. But, nonetheless, for me, and people who have battled this will take umbrage, probably, but I actually got sick of the righteousness of being sober all the time.

"I like being able to cross the river and get to the other side. Even if the other side means lying flat on my face with a hangover. That's where I've washed up." He likes surprising himself. "When you're not drinking, in the morning you think, 'I know exactly what state I'm going to be at midnight tonight'. When you're drinking you don't have a bloody clue! You might be on another planet!"

He says he "would probably describe myself as an alcoholic, yeah. I would describe myself as a neurotic, an alcoholic."

What is he neurotic about? "I don't know. I like being neurotic."

That might or might not be true. As might this. He said, "You know, I've got gold buried around the place. But I can't remember where!"

One of us remembered we were supposed to be talking about his book, and it wasn't him. "The personal story of Sam Hunt is not the focus of this book," the introduction says, as a sort of caveat emptor, perhaps. It is his first prose offering but there are, of course, poems; his and other people's. Are the poems the personal story of Sam Hunt? "Oh, I don't know about that. I mean, you wear masks."

He put his boots on for the photograph. The photographer told him not to bother; we wanted the unguarded moment. "You'll be shit out of luck. Ha, ha, ha." When you attempt to interview Sam Hunt, I said, having read other interviews, you don't get Sam Hunt. You get Sam Hunt delivering poems, his and other people's. I got his new poem and Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Denis Glover, and others from the sampler he keeps inside his head.

He said, "Bullshit. That book's full of stuff that I thought and said." His book, emphatically as that "bullshit", is not a memoir, despite the subtitle: Charting a Poet's Life.

"Maybe I didn't know the word memoir existed." It might be a book about friendship. He said, "Friendship comes into it; so does silence. Lots of things come into it. But it's not a book about my friends. It's not the Famous Five or the Secret Seven. I haven't gone into a lot of personal stuff, which some people might expect. Well, I'm sorry if they expect that. But, it's not, 'who your girlfriend is' or whatever."

He doesn't like living with girlfriends. Ask why not and you'll get James K. Baxter and Leonard Cohen ("bitch'n in the kitchen"). I wondered whether this was a romantic notion or a selfish one. "I think it's a fairly humane one, actually. Ha, ha. I've never made it a measure of my love and my respect for them." I know he has a girlfriend only because I was looking at his books and he said she had ordered them alphabetically. I asked how long the girlfriend had been around, or rather, not around. He said, "I've known her since just after the French Revolution."

Ask a silly question ... I asked another, about his stovepipe trousers, that trademark look which, with that signature hair, make him look like a bewigged stilt caught in a gale. How did he get those trousers off? "I do what most people do. I take my boots off and slide my legs out."

Anyway, the book. There are chapters about friendships with poets and his dog, Minstrel, who might have been more famous than his owner. A good story from the book: "If I ever run into Roger Douglas, every time we get the same story ... 'The day they booted me out of the Labour Party was the day his dog died. TV 1, TV3: leading item, Minstrel Hunt's death; second thing, Minister of Finance sacked from the party."'

He is only slightly less famous than the dog, although he harrumphs at the suggestion he's in any way public property. If you turn up at his place uninvited, he'll tell you to F off, which is exactly what he did to a famous telly person who decided to pop in.

But people think they know him, and that impersonating him is clever and funny. "It doesn't worry me. I don't give a f***, I know how it sounds and if people think it sounds like that, they're welcome to it. I know a bloke who can do impersonations of Big Ben. It doesn't mean he's Big Ben, or even that he knows the time."

He's "bemused and sometimes a little bit irritated". As you might be if you'd been a stutterer, as he was. You can hear it still when he speaks. You can barely identify the stutter when he's reciting, which might be partly why he's developed that distinctive style. He once went to give a performance at a school and "This person who thought they were really funny ... got up on stage and did a so-called impersonation of me. And they were really laying into the stutter. And I thought, 'I don't want to be here. I was doing it as a favour, pretty much. So I went on to the stage and I said, 'You can all get f****d,' and I did it without a stutter and I felt good and I caught the last ferry home."

That might have been an unguarded moment. He said, "It's well past 11 o'clock! Would you like a little glass of champagne?" So we had a little bottle of champagne and he recited more poems by way of answers to questions.

A little later, he asked, solicitously, "how are you getting on with the interview?"

I said, "I have no idea." He clapped his hands again and said "that's a good answer".