He would later recount on numerous occasions an incident in which he was strapped for reciting a poem by James K. Baxter, which had sexual imagery, in the classroom.
In his final year at St Peter's his English master had been the poet Ken Arvidson and he had obtained University Entrance.
[3] Hunt has said that "if Mr Arvidson ... had not come to the school, I would not have lasted [at St Peter's] as long as I did, and I'd just turned sixteen when I left.
[10] In the period 1964–67, Hunt led a restless wandering life around New Zealand but particularly between Auckland and Wellington, attending university in both cities.
[11] Hunt and other young poets were interested in daily linguistic usage and in the natural units of speech rather than any special poetic language.
His own experience is his single subject; moments in his life, love and its loss, and poems about his father, mother and sons.
"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'".
In the 1980s Hunt with Jack Lasenby and Ian Riggir (who both lived in Paremata) published poems on an 1886 upright press obtained from the Government Printing Office.
[16] 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.
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.
[13] 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").
[3][13] 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 distinctive appearance – tall and thin, usually wearing long, tight, trousers ("Foxton straights" he has called them) with vests and open-chested shirts, with long hair curling wildly above a well-worn face – is complemented by the familiar gravelly drawl, the rhythmic, sometimes staccato and sometimes incantatory quality of his recitation (often tapping his fingers or flicking a hand to emphasise the poetic beat) and the execution of occasional small dance-like steps of concentration.
"A bard in the truest sense of the itinerant minstrel, Hunt's turangawaewae [i.e. 'one's own turf', literally: 'a place to stand'] is the public bar.
[30] Each of the five wine varieties (Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Pinot Noir, Merlot Malbec) features poetry from Hunt on the label and has a QR code that enable users to listen Hunt, Kilgour and The Heavy 8s performing brief excerpts of the poems.