By Sandra Simpson
Beginnings
The earliest reference to haiku so far found in New Zealand is in a rural Taranaki newspaper and The Press (Christchurch), both of which in August 1911 published an uncredited piece about ‘the hokku’ and the life of Bashō, while a handful of regional newspapers in 1914 published a short article from London that attempted to describe a hokku. The Evening Star (Dunedin) ran a book review on 16 May 1914 of ‘Through the Tori’ by Yone Noguichi, which included two essays on hokku.[1]
On 10 August 1925 The Southland Times published this hokku (New Zealand’s first?), written anonymously for the newspaper:
A tinkling bell
Fills all the silence –
Hush! The world is empty.
Southener
Which prompted Shaun O’Sullivan of Invercargill (on 21 August) to: Three lines, that saying nothing / Leave profundities unsaid / There! The hokku is finished. On 8 September 1928 The Press carried a thoughtful piece by local writer Helena Henderson (1884-1963) explaining the various types of Japanese poetry, including ‘hokku’, and on 16 September 1930 a lengthy article about a paper presented to “Mrs Benson’s women’s class by Mrs Billing” on Japanese poetry, including haiku. However, the first haiku published in Aotearoa New Zealand probably did not appear until the 1970s,[2] thanks primarily to specialist publications and the development of haiku groups, as well as informal mentoring, and many of the contemporary poets mentioned here have also shared their knowledge in school classrooms.
This essay examines the flowering of haiku in New Zealand with the caveat that in this country there is a distinct gap between mainstream poets who write ‘haiku’ without knowing much about the genre and the poems that come from within the haiku community. Almost inevitably, the two do not meet and few genuine haiku appear in mainstream publications.
New Zealand poets are well represented in the many international haiku anthologies that have appeared, including Haiku sans frontieres: une anthologie Mondiale (1998); A Vast Sky: An anthology of contemporary world haiku (2014); naad anunaad: an anthology of contemporary world haiku (2016); the annual Red Moon Anthologies (since 1996); and the biennial A New Resonance: Emerging voices in English-language haiku (since 1999).
As technology has advanced and our access to it become commonplace, New Zealand haiku poets are now regularly published all around the world, and are often invited to judge overseas contests.
Taking Root: Some Early Haiku Poets
The first two poets highlighted are both Australian – one who translated haiku from Japanese, thus giving writers in New Zealand access to Japanese haiku, and the other a great friend to haiku poets in this country.
Sydney-born poet and Oriental scholar Harold Stewart (1916-95) published two volumes of haiku translations – A Net of Fireflies: Japanese Haiku and Haiku Paintings (1960) and A Chime of Windbells in English Verse (1969, both Tuttle) – which are among the best-selling books in haiku history, having been reprinted for nearly 20 years. His first book gave him an international reputation, and a certain degree of notoriety, for his use of two lines of rhyming iambic pentameter, the ‘heroic couplet’, with titles. He was not the first to translate haiku into two lines, but was the first (and only) to use an end-stopped rhyme with titles, a translation technique which attracted both attention and criticism.[3] Stewart won a scholarship to study Japanese culture in Japan and first travelled there in 1961, before moving permanently to Kyoto in 1966.
Late Persimmon
Wintry twigs: matured by frost and sun
A globe of orange jelly hangs on one
Hō-ō[4]
A Net of Fireflies (Tuttle, 1960)
For her depth and breadth of work Janice M. Bostok (1942-2011) is rightly considered the doyenne of haiku in Australia. Introduced to haiku by an American penfriend, she began to write creatively in the latter half of the 1960s. The translations of Japanese haiku by Peter Pauper Press (NY, USA) helped her understanding of the form. Bostok has written that “I set out from the beginning to be a haiku poet, rather than a mainstream poet who also wrote haiku”.[5]
By 1971 her work was being published overseas, especially in the United States. In 1972, Bostok founded the first Australian haiku magazine, Tweed (published 1972-79), saying about early Australian submissions: “Most of the so-called haiku were in strict 5-7-5 syllable pattern and rhymed. They were top-heavy with simile and metaphor and personification. This was not what I had been learning from the then modern pioneering haiku writers overseas.” Her content was primarily from American poets. Bostok’s many awards included a Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award in 1975 for Walking into the Sun (Shelters Press, USA, 1974).
pregnant again . . .
the fluttering of moths
against the window
Janice M Bostok
Walking into the Sun (1974)
Bostok closed her Tweed journal, partly because of a lack of support and/or interest from Australian writers, and ceased writing haiku. In 1986 she received her BA in English Literature and remarried her Romanian migrant ex-husband. However, his one condition to the remarriage was that she abandon haiku.[6] Despite this stricture, Bostok wrote haiku in secret and it wasn’t until 1990 when Ion Codrescu translated some of her haiku into Romanian and published them in the first issue of his journal Hermitage that Bostok’s husband was able to read her poems in his own language – and finally understood what she was doing.
Bostok visited Canada and the US in 1978 to connect with haiku people who had become friends via letter, including the man she considered her mentor, William J Higginson. In her biography of Bostok, Sharon Dean wrote: “On Jan’s return to the haiku scene in 1990 she felt compelled to make a stand against what she saw as a ‘lack of experimentation’ within the genre in Australia. This was the point at which, largely in tribute to [American poet] Marlene Mountain, she decided to write nothing but one-line haiku for five years.”
stopt to allow geese crossing some idiot honks
Janice M Bostok
A Splash of Sunlight (1998)
At various times Bostok was also haiku editor for the journals Hobo (published 1995-99), paper wasp: paper wasp: a journal of Australian haiku (1994-2016), and Stylus (2002-6), and for 5 years from its debut in 1996 was South Pacific editor for the annual Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku. In all, she had 16 collections of haiku-related work published, and more than 4,000 of her individual haiku appeared in journals and anthologies in Australia and overseas.[8] Bostok ‘paid it forward’ as a mentor to many aspiring haiku poets, including in New Zealand.
Taking Root: Some Early Haiku Poets in New Zealand
There is no evidence that New Zealand-born Max Bickerton (1901-66) wrote any haiku of his own, but his milestone work, Issa’s Life and Poetry (Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1932), was the translation of 149 haiku by Issa, likely the first mass translation of the poet’s work into English, accompanied by his notes about the haiku. Bickerton presented his translations as single lines, a novelty at the time. Living in Japan for 10 years from 1924, he went there to work as a teacher.[9]
The first people to take the first steps with haiku in New Zealand were mainstream poets, with mixed results.
Rupert Glover (b 1945), son of renowned New Zealand poet Denis Glover and for many years a prominent Christchurch lawyer, has no recollection of how he came across haiku but his 1971 pamphlet, Dragonfly Wings, contained eight poems that were recognisably haiku, although he did not use that term. This 5-7-5 poem is probably the first true haiku published in New Zealand.[10]
The water is still,
The reeds are still, no movement
But dragonfly wings
Rupert Glover
Dragonfly Wings (1971)
Award-winning poet, children’s author and short-story writer Ruth Dallas (1919-2008)[11] first encountered haiku in 1937 at the age of 18 while reading Japanese poetry, and later in life explored the genre more fully. Her first haiku was published in her 1976 collection Walking on the Snow, joint winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. Many of her longer poems also contain haiku-like images, including the opening lines of ‘Milking Before Dawn’ (1947) that, for this reader, have a resonance with Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’: In the drifting rain the cows in the yard are black / And wet and shiny as rocks in an ebbing tide
Dallas, who lost the sight in one eye at the age of 15, wrote from an early age, never living beyond her beloved Southland and Otago. From the early 1960s Dallas’ interest in Asian philosophies began to steer her already concise verse towards even greater “brevity and density”. She was reported as saying that writing haiku “is an excellent discipline encouraging observation, lateral thinking and a feeling for words”.
Catching the rainbow
On a floating thread …
A new-born spider
Ruth Dallas
First Place, NZ Poetry Society Haiku Contest (1996)
Her books include Shadow show (Caxton Press, 1968), Steps of the sun (Caxton Press, 1979) and The joy of a Ming vase (Otago University Press, 2006). She became a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 1989 for services to literature. After her death a number of unpublished haiku were found and most printed by Otakou Press as part of a limited edition (100 copies) of her unpublished poems.
Howard Dengate (b 1947, Australia), lived in New Zealand for 15 years from 1970, studying and working as a crop scientist. He published his poetry, including haiku, in Aotearoa, as well as having one selected for a “top Japanese magazine that paid me $US45”. His interest in haiku followed his interest in Zen Buddhism, which itself began after meeting an Englishman in 1971 in Kashmir, India, while waiting for the border to open. This man gave him a book, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, and some meditation instruction. Dengate then read The Way of Zen by Alan W Watts (Pelican, 1972). “I fell in love with the ‘nothing special’ child-like haiku form, the idea that a person has no mind apart from what they know and see. While I never attempted the 17-syllable constraint, I did seek to always have the seasonal reference and was aware of the four moods of loneliness, suchness, grief/nostalgia and mystery. I also loved the sense of humour the haiku writers clearly expressed.”
In 2013 Dengate published a free online version[12] of his three poetry collections, two of which include haiku – Incense and Other Ecstasies (Outrigger Publishers, 1979) and Unavoidable Cloud of Heron (Dingo Press, 1988). “In the second book I attempted an early version of AI by taking apart a book of 100 famous haiku into word classes and using a random-access computer process to generate endless variations.” A selection was published in Morepork 3 in 1977. Dengate’s haiku also appeared in Real Fire: New Zealand Poetry of the 1960s and 1970s, selected by Bernard Gadd (Hallard Press, 2001).
Searching in the mountains
alone at sunset
the cry of the plover.
Howard Dengate
Incense and Other Ecstasies (1979)
“I still live in haiku sometimes,” he wrote in late 2024.” I am just back yesterday back from our 28th trek in the mountains of Nepal … and every day was a haiku day. It is a way of looking simply at the world as it is.”[13]
Koenraad Kuiper (b 1944, Germany; emigrated from The Netherlands in 1951) started writing haiku and senryū while living in Canada in the early 1970s, finding the discipline of the forms attractive. His first haiku were published in West Coast Review (Canada) in 1973. Back in New Zealand the same year, his work turned to senryū which allowed for a “slight breath of social commentary” within the same tight constraints. His senryu sequence, Signs of Life, features poems that are all three lines but with the lines exploded to provide an additional graphic representation. Having, over the decade from 1970, endeavoured to follow a more disciplined approach to both form and content, Kuiper slowly gravitated away from haiku.
A hot day;
a boy
watches
his footprints after
wading
a puddle.
Koenraad Kuiper
Signs of Life (Wai-te-ata Press, 1981)
Glover, Dengate and Kuiper all followed their haiku path outsidethe embrace of the NZPS, as did Christodoulos (Chris) Moisa (b 1948), the son of Cypriot emigrants, who was writing in the 1980s. Ireland-born Eileen Phillip (d 1984) had four haiku appear in New Zealand’s pre-eminent literary journal, Landfall, in 1981. Award-winning mainstream poet Bill Manhire (b 1946), one of New Zealand’s most influential poets and teachers, said he first met haiku in the 1960s through The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse (1964) and Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1955), books he still has. Manhire was made a Companion of the New Zealander Order of Merit in 2005 for services to literature.
The first New Zealander to establish an international reputation in the haiku world was Christchurch poet John O’Connor (1949-2015), who recalled that although he was likely to have written his first haiku in 1973, it was “tossed away”. He invested in books from the US to better understand the form and in the later 1980s joined the Haiku Society of America. Founding editor of the journal plainwraps (published 1989-91), O’Connor enjoyed exploring the possibilities of concrete haiku, the use of computer symbols and graphics in haiku, and the boundaries between haiku and other forms of creative writing. He was also a founding editor of Sudden Valley Press, a not-for-profit that publishes poetry by New Zealand writers and offers the biennial John O’Connor First Book Awardto the best debut manuscript by a South Island poet. O’Connor named the press Sudden Valley to encompass the surprise and broadening of understanding to which good poetry leads.
attic dust
finding my mother’s
footsteps
John O’Connor
frogpond 14.3 (1991)
The main impetus to the development and practice of haiku in New Zealand was the debut in 1987 of the annual New Zealand Poetry Society (NZPS) Haiku Contest and publication of a contest anthology – driven entirely by the enthusiasm of committee member David Drummond (1938-90), who had discovered haiku while visiting Japan in the 1980s. The anthology was initially published by Drummond’s Nagare Press in Palmerston North and from 1992 by the NZPS. The first volume, A Fall of Leaves, featured 92 haiku from writers in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Japan and the US, and an informative essay by Drummond about haiku, including techniques, the Japanese masters and haiku in the West. The 1989 contest anthology, Winter’s Blossoms, received an Honourable Mention in the 1990 Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards. A children’s haiku contest was added in 1997.
Raydia d’Elsa (1922-2001) of Wellington won the 1987 award for best individual haiku. A member of the NZ Academy of Fine Arts, D’Elsa was married to well-known classical composer David Farquhar(1928-2007)who, in 1987,published Writing on the Sand for mezzo-soprano and violin, which set seven of her haiku to music.[14]
I write on the sand
the tide washes it away
I write on the sand
Raydia d’Elsa
A Fall of Leaves (NZPS, 1987)
After a run of overseas judges, the NZPS adult contest was, for a long period from 2000, almost always judged by a New Zealander. More recently, however, the NZPS has reverted to using judges from other countries, which raises the issue of vernacular and symbolism being fully appreciated. But, with a small pool of experienced local writers to call on and entries from around the world, perhaps it was inevitable that the contest, despite its name, should, once again, become somewhat homogenised.
O’Connor later wrote in an essay,[15] “Clearly, one cannot usefully debate with a world movement. If New Zealand haiku is to find a way again, and preferably its own way (as Japanese haiku has had to at times over the centuries) it will be best found / created / developed by serious haiku poets working together in an appropriate forum – as apparently in Australia and Britain, where some elements within their haiku communities appear to have struck their own distinctive notes/approaches. (Remember they didn’t have a head start on us as movements. Our haiku was more healthy than theirs throughout much of the 1990s.)”
Haiku Gathers Steam in New Zealand: 1990s
Soil scientist Cyril Childs (1941-2012) was introduced to haiku during a year-long research fellowship in Japan in 1989-90. Thanks to his efforts in editing the first and second New Zealand Haiku Anthologies (NZPS, 1993 / 1998), the haiku community in New Zealand not only began to coalesce, but to flourish to the point where several writers – Childs included – were recognised internationally. Both national anthologies won Honourable Mentions in the HSA Merit Book Awards. Childs was New Zealand selector for the international edition of frogpond 24.1 (2001), and was co-editor with Joanna Preston of Listening to the Rain (2002), a Small White Teapot Group anthology, which received a Highly Commended in the HSA Merit Book Awards. He also served as president of the NZ Poetry Society.
Childs loved sport, particularly cricket and rugby, and was thrilled to have nine haiku selected for A Tingling Catch (Headworx, 2010),an anthology of New Zealand cricket poetry. His sole collection was Beyond the Paper Lanterns: a journey with cancer (paper lantern press, 2000), detailing the diagnosis, treatment and death of Vivienne, his first wife, as well as their two trips to Japan. A copy was carried to the summit of Mt Fuji in 2000 by American haiku poet Jerry Kilbride in a climb organised by the US Breast Cancer Fund.
her breast
where the lump came out –
crescent moon
Cyril Childs
beyond the paper lanterns (paper lantern press, 2000)
Catherine Mair (b 1938) was mother to four young children and dairy farming in Katikati when she began writing nature-focused poetry in the late 1980s, seeking a creative outlet at a time when she was unable to paint. A local children’s author introduced her to another writer who thought she might be interested in haiku, with the result that her first haiku was published in 1988. Mair later credited her unconventional upbringing – including being taught to shoot and fish by her father and being taken on hunting trips – as instilling a love of nature.
Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in her fifties, Mair published Caterpillar, a diary-like collection of haiku in 1990 about a single trip to Australia, Hong Kong, China and Tibet. In 1994 she spoke at an international haiku festival in Constanta, Romania. The next year she suggested to Patricia Donnelly, editor of the poetry journal SPIN, that New Zealand might be ready for a journal dedicated to haiku and its related forms – which led to a 5-year stint as editor of the annual haiku-focused winterSPIN.[16] The first issue in 1995 included “small poems” from a fear of not having enough publishable material. Mair was co-organiser with Sandra Simpson of two poetry festivals in Tauranga; the second in 1998 included Janice Bostok from Australia in its line-up and saw the launch of Shadow Patches, the first book of haibun to be published in New Zealand, authored by Mair, Bostok and Kiwi Bernard Gadd, who at the time was co-editor of winterSPIN.
She published several collections, including Seascape (2003), Bow Wave Bow Wave Bow Wave (2004), stolen time (tanka with Patricia Prime, 2006) and incoming tide, a collection of her haiku, tanka and haibun (2016). In 2008 Mair was awarded a Queen’s Service Medal for services to poetry and the community.
indian summer
sea fills the slack
in her old togs
Catherine Mair
tiny gaps (NZPS, 2006)
After retiring from business and a period living overseas, Ernest J Berry (1929-2021) returned to New Zealand and in 1995 “adopted haiku as a retirement project”, quickly establishing a prolific output which saw him published widely and win awards all over the world. In 1997 Berry organised Haiku Sounds, a weekend workshop, in Picton under the auspices of the NZ Poetry Society and featuring Janice Bostok of Australia as guest speaker – the first gathering of haiku poets in New Zealand.[17]
Founder of Picton Poets in 1984, Berry suggested forming a haiku group in Wellington, which convened in 1998 and was named Windrift – to attend the quarterly meetings he had to cross the notoriously rough Cook Strait. In 2019 the group, by then meeting monthly, went into recess. Berry was also a member of the Zazen e-mail haiku critique group formed in 2000 in Wellington by Vanessa Proctor (later a resident of Australia), Bertus de Jonge (1932-2002) and Tim Bravenboer; soon afterwards joined by Jeanette Stace and Catherine Mair. The group went on to publish A to Zazen, an anthology of members’ work.
no-man’s land
the rattle of a troop train
returning empty
Ernest J Berry
A Glimpse of Red (Red Moon Press, 2000)
A veteran of the Korean War, Berry wrote a book-length haiku sequence about his experiences with American poet Jerry Kilbride. Two versions of this book appear to exist – forgotten war: a Korean war haiku sequence (Prisma Print 2016) and 162 Haiku: a Korean war sequence (Post Pressed, 2000). The latter edition, but named as forgotten war, was placed third in the 2001 Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award.His other collections were getting on (Red Moon Press, 2021), green tea & sushi (Prisma Print, 2016), Inside Out: Home and Garden Sequences(2006),and, in collaboration with photographer Graeme Matthews, a raindrop, a flowing river (1998), which received an Honourable Mention in the 1999 HSA Merit Book Awards. Berry was South Pacific editor for the annual Red Moon Anthology from 2002-11, preceded by Janice Bostok in Australia, and succeeded by Sandra Simpson in New Zealand.
Richard von Sturmer (b 1957), a Zen Buddhist teacher, lyricist and performer, has had work in all four national anthologies and continues to write haiku and various of its related forms, as well as other literary works, but is something of an outsider in the New Zealand haiku community. He encountered haiku in the early 1980s and was “really hooked” after a kindly uncle in Australia gave him R H Blyth’s A History of Haiku in two volumes. Von Sturmer’s collection A Network of Dissolving Threads (AUP, 1991) featured the first haibun published in New Zealand. He has also written Suchness: Zen poetry and prose (Headworx, 2005). Von Sturmer was among the Kiwi haiku poets included in the chapbook series from 2010 to about 2012 by John Denny of Puriri Press, who produced 50 numbered copies of each booklet, which he typeset and printed by hand. For a decade from 1993 von Sturmer lived at a Zen Buddhist Centre in New York State.
raindrops
and the sound of a shoe
being unlaced
Richard von Sturmer
invisible sunrise (Puriri Press, 2010)
In 1998 Bernard Gadd (1935-2007) joined Catherine Mair as co-editor of winterSPIN, her last issue. Gadd renamed the annual journal Kokako in 2003, and in 2006 it became a twice-yearly publication. Patricia Prime joined as assistant editor in 2001, a post she held until the final print issue in April 2024. Editors have been (tenures in brackets): Gadd (1998-2005); Owen Bullock (2005-08, who later moved to Australia), Joanna Preston (2008-12) and Margaret Beverland (2012-24). Editor-in-chief of the new online Kokako, published in September 2024 (issue 41), was Graham Bates, with Elaine Riddell and Celia Hope as haiku editors.
thud of the last window
in the beach house …
summer’s end
Bernard Gadd
Kokako 8 (2008)
Gadd, who worked as a high school English teacher and ESOL tutor, also wrote long-form poetry, fiction for adults and young adults, and plays. He selected poems, including some proto-haiku, for Real Fire: New Zealand Poetry of the 1960s and 1970s (his own Hallard Press, 2001).
Kokako held a haiku competition in 2003 for New Zealanders only, but from 2007 the contest was open to all. Kokako’s first tanka contest was in 2006, and the two contests were subsequently held in alternate years until 2016.
hospital window
in a morphine haze
the starry sky
Patricia Prime
Valley Micropress 16:10 (2013)
In the 1990s Australia’s Micropress published a New Zealand version under the editorship of Kate O’Neill of Nelson. Poet and professional musician Tony Chad, who attended the 1997 Haiku Sounds in Picton, was the same year asked by O’Neill to establish a North Island edition. All three versions had permission to print work from the others. Chad named his publication Valley Micropress to reflect where he lived (Hutt Valley, near Wellington) and published it 10 times a year from 1998-2018 (the South Island edition had ceased long before).
Pancake Rocks:
tourists stop
for breakfast
Tony Chad
number eight wire (piwakawaka press, 2019)
The NZ Poetry Society newsletter, now the quarterly magazine a fine line, has been a long-time outlet for haiku by Kiwis, and for about 3 years from 2012 had haikai pages edited by Kirsten Cliff (Elliot, b 1977), who in 2025 lives in England. Windrift Haiku Group, which wound up in 2019, made a donation to NZPS to support haiku in a fine line, which pays authors. The 2024 editor of a fine line was Gail Ingram, with Cadence Chung taking over in 2025.
injecting myself
for the first time
autumn reds
Kirsten Cliff Elliot
Patient Property: A journey through leukaemia (Velvet Dusk Publishing, 2019)
Mainstream poetry journals that have regularly featured haiku include Printout (published 1991-97), Bravado (2003-10), and the long-running takahē (est. 1989).
Where The Twain Shall Meet
Several haiku poets are ‘shared’ between Australia and New Zealand, for example Vanessa Proctor and Owen Bullock were first resident in New Zealand before moving to Australia. One poet who has regularly moved backwards and forwards across the Tasman Sea is Australia-born Jeffrey Harpeng (b 1954), who has lived between Brisbane and New Zealand for many years. He was a foundation member of The Small White Teapot haiku group in Christchurch (NZ) and, on his return to Australia, a member of Paper Wasp Haiku Group. After acquiring Peter Pauper haiku and tanka books in Brisbane in 1975-76, Harpeng says haiku “turned from a sporadic malady to a full fever thanks to the confidence, the nod, the ‘aye’ of John O’Connor [of New Zealand]”, who also introduced Harpeng to Blyth’s haiku volumes and overseas journals. In 1990 Harpeng, living in Christchurch, hosted renga parties at his home. He was co-judge with O’Connor of the 1991 JAL International Children’s Haiku Contest. Among his publications are Interruption of Dreams (Sudden Valley Press, 2003), his haibun collection A Quarter Past Sometime (Post Pressed, 2007), Quartet: a string of haibun in four voices (2008) and FourTellings: a Trans-Tasman Haibun Renga (2009).
on the coffin lid
our faces
in the clouds
Jeffrey Harpeng
Famous Reporter 30 (2004)
still heading out (2013, eds Jacqui Murray, Katherine Samuelowicz) was the first – and so far, only – joint anthology of New Zealand and Australian haiku poets, and was dedicated to the memory of poet and publisher John Knight (1935-2012) whose Post Pressed had produced books by poets on both sides of the Tasman. The following haiku is from that publication.
beach innings
three driftwood stumps
and a dog at mid on
Tony Beyer (New Zealand)
An anthology of haiku written during the weekend, Poetry from the Edge (the subtitle of the conference), was published. In her editorial, Carole Harrison wrote, “Registrations exceeded 200. Aussies and Kiwis revelled in their own cultures and countries. Poets from elsewhere brought their energies and cultural backgrounds, and learnt lots of new words. They saw how amazing and different life is Down Under. And yet, the same …”
railway bridge
tagging on top of tagging on top of tagging
Celia Hope (New Zealand)
Poetry from the Edge (2022)
A second HDU took place in August 2024, this time organised by Mumford, Harrison, Courtney and Carole Reynolds (Australia), and again produced an associated anthology of haiku, A Sensory Journey, edited by Harrison and containing some 145 poems. More than 160 people attended the 2024 event, about 47% from Australia and 20% from New Zealand. Local presenters included Peter Free, Sandra Simpson, Sue Courtney and Tim Roberts. An HDU haiku contest was facilitated and judged by the Portarlington Haiku Society (Victoria).
Something Unique: Katikati Haiku Pathway
Catherine Mair and Australian haijin Janice Bostok met at the 1997 Haiku Sounds, where Bostok remarked that before she died, she would like to see one of her haiku engraved on a stone. Shortly afterwards, Mair was grieving the sale of the Katikati farm that had originally belonged to her grandparents – she was born and married at her grandparents’ home and her children raised on the property – when she recalled Bostok’s words. Mair convinced the local council and the developer of what would be the Highfields housing subdivision that the riverbank area should become a haiku pathway. Her vision tidily coincided with a drive to reclaim the Uretara Stream for the town after the banks of the river, a vital link for settlers to the outside world in the 1870s, had become a wasteland.
One of New Zealand’s Millennium Projects, the Katikati Haiku Pathway had its specially designed footbridge dedicated as the sun rose on 1 January 2000, and was officially opened in June that year with featured poets attending from New Zealand, Australia and Britain. It is probably the largest collection of haiku stones outside Japan and was the world’s first such project outside Japan. The collection has grown from the original 24 haiku to, in 2024, 47 poems with all the haiku selected from previously published work, a way, Mair believed, of guaranteeing quality. Each poem has been chosen to reflect its surroundings. Mair, Sandra Simpson and Margaret Beverland have all been long-serving members of the project committee. Bostok gifted a sumi-e frog painting for use on a sign board in the park.
strangers –
they stop and ask me the way
if only I knew
Barry Morrall, 1944-2013
Katikati Haiku Pathway
New Zealand poets featured on the pathway are: Catherine Mair, Barry Morrall, Ernest Berry, Patricia Prime, Sandra Simpson, John O’Connor, Cyril Childs, Jeanette Stace, Tony Chad, Shirley May, pnw donnelly and Bernard Gadd.
A biennial Katikati Haiku Pathway Contest was run by the project committee from 2008-21 with adult and junior sections and no entry fee. Efforts were always made to encourage locals to enter.
evening calm –
duck’s wake
the width of the estuary
Catherine Bullock
Best Local Haiku (2014)
Finding a Voice: Haiku in New Zealand in the 21st century
New Zealand English has been infused with home-grown idioms and slang, some shared with Australia and some particular to the ‘shaky isles’. Older expressions such as ‘heading for the scratcher’ (going to bed) may be disappearing, but new vernacular is springing up all the time, for example, ‘chur bro’ (thanks, mate) and ‘sweet as’. Some old favourites include, ‘wrap your laughing gear around this’ (being offered something to eat), togs (swimsuit), box of birds (feeling good), stonkered (dead tired), and ‘up the boohai’ (somewhere remote). New Zealand English has absorbed – and is rapidly absorbing – Māori words into everyday use, eg, māhi (work), taihoa (be patient), kapai (good), mana (authority / leadership) and puku (stomach), while the slang name for a New Zealander – Kiwi – is also the name of the country’s national bird.
Although New Zealand has never had a national haiku organisation, its small population and relatively small land mass means haiku poets heed the call to gather when an occasion is offered.
Three members of the Windrift Haiku Group – Nola Borrell, Karen Peterson Butterworth and Jeanette Stace – organised the first national haiku conference in Wellington in 2005, naming it Haiku Festival Aotearoa. One of the highlights of the event was a reading of haiku, selected by Cyril Childs, accompanied by cello music.
Jeanette Stace (1917-2006) began publishing poetry in 1939 and also wrote plays for children. Stace first became involved with the NZPS in the mid-1980s, and in 1986 became secretary, and was back in harness by 1990. She was the society’s informal historian and for a long time her home address was the address for the Poetry Society. She co-edited three NZPS anthologies (1990-92) and finally resigned from the committee in 1999, at a mere 82 years old. She hosted the Windrift Haiku Group at her home for many years, and was a member of Zazen, an Australasian email haiku group started in 2000. One of her haiku is engraved on a boulder on the Haiku Pathway in Katikati. The year she died she won the international section of the Ito-en Oi Ocha New Haiku Contest and the company published her haiku on bottles of green tea. In 2008 her estate established a cash award in her name for the winners of the NZPS International Haiku Contest and the Junior Haiku Contest. Her books, both published by Bearfax, were Across the Harbour (1996) and Green Tea: Haiku & Other Poetry, published posthumously in 2007.
weather forecast
searching the sky
for an isobar
Jeanette Stace
A to Zazen (Kiwiana Publishing, 2004)
Nola Borrell (b 1939) met haiku through the NZPS in the mid-1990s and has been publishing haiku since. For the NZPS she has been secretary, judge of international haiku competitions, anthology editor, and compiler of KiwiHaiku in the magazine. Along with Jeanette Stace and Karen Peterson Butterworth, Borrell was co-organiser of the inaugural Haiku Festival Aotearoa in Wellington in 2005. After Ernie Berry and Linzy Forbes, Borrell became the Windrift Haiku Group’s most constant influence, taking on roles as convener, secretary and treasurer and sharing the decision to wind up the group in 2019 as attendance fell. Borrell and Peterson Butterworth co-edited the third New Zealand haiku anthology, a taste of nashi (Windrift, 2008), which they dedicated to Stace. Borrell’s work includes the collection waking echoes (Korimako Press, 2013) and the chapbook this wide sky (Puriri Press, 2012).
waking echoes the piping of pied oystercatchers
Nola Borrell
Presence 42 (2010)
Karen Peterson Butterworth (b 1934), who lives on the Kāpiti Coast, has written about her introduction to haiku: “When I joined the New Zealand Poetry Society in the 1990s, I came to haiku as a newcomer, and was not at first impressed by the genre. Then I bought a copy of the society’s 1996 anthology Catching the Rainbow, and read the prize-winning haiku by Ruth Dallas. She introduced me to the haiku world of illusions and contradictions, and caught me as well on her floating thread. I began to borrow books on haiku.” She, Borrell and Stace organised the country’s first national haiku festival in Wellington in 2005, and were also the ‘triumvirate’ leaders of the Windrift Haiku Group. An award-winning writer in several forms, Peterson Butterworth has learned to speak basic te reo Māori.
pōwhiri –
women sit behind the men
guessing who farted[18]
Karen Peterson Butterworth
the enormous picture (NZPS, 2004)
the taste of nashi was launched in 2008 at the second Haiku Festival Aotearoa in Christchurch, convened by the Small White Teapot Group, led by Barbara Strang and Judith Walsh. SWTG started in 2001 after Jim Kacian’s visit to Christchurch, when he encouraged local groups to form. Strang, Walsh, Joanna Preston, Jeff Harpeng, Greeba Brydges-Jones (1928-2015), Helen Bascand (1929-2015), and John O’Connor were among the early members. In 2025 SWTG is led by Strang.
Barbara Strang (b 1944),who lives in Christchurch, first encountered haiku at an arts course for the unemployed in the 1980s but it wasn’t until 1993 when by chance she attended the launch of The New Zealand Haiku Anthology, edited by Cyril Childs, that she found something other than 5-7-5, which opened up a whole new world for her. Her “first real haiku” was highly commended in the 1994 NZPS competition, “and in 1997 I was astonished to win”. Strang, who holds an MA in Creative Writing and also writes long-form poetry, has had work in most NZPS haiku anthologies since 1998. She has published two books of long-form poetry, Duck Weather (2006) and The Corrosion Zone (2011), has edited and typeset books by other people, including NZPS annual anthologies (2009-10), and was an editor for Sudden Valley Press.
ghost suburb
our headlights catch
a broken pane
Barbara Strang
number eight wire (piwakawaka press, 2019)
Award-winning mainstream poet Joanna Preston (b 1972) was born in Australia, emigrating to New Zealand in 1993. She lived in Britain (2003-06) where she gained her MPhil in Creative Writing. “My first encounter with haiku was at primary school in outback NSW. I forgot about it until many years later when I started exploring form, and was involved in the Airing Cupboard Women Poets group in Christchurch, alongside Helen Bascand, Greeba Brydges-Jones and Barbara Strang. Who put me straight about a lot of things.” Preston co-edited the Small White Teapot Group anthology listening to the rain (2002) with Cyril Childs, which received a Highly Commended in the 2003 Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards; edited three NZPS competition anthologies; and co-edited Leaving the Red Zone: poems from the Canterbury earthquakes (Clerestory Press, 2016), as well as editing Kokako from 2008-12. She was a foundation member of The Australian Haiku Society and the Small White Teapot Group in Christchurch.
hotpools –
my breasts weightless
in your hands
Joanna Preston
the taste of nashi (Windrift, 2008)
The third Haiku Festival Aotearoa was held in Tauranga in 2012, organised by Sandra Simpson and Margaret Beverland, and as well as Kiwis drew several registrants from Australia and had Jim Kacian from the US as keynote speaker and a workshop leader. In 2019 Simpson and Beverland edited number eight wire, the fourth New Zealand haiku anthology. Over the years the anthologies have featured 154 haiku by 19 poets (1993); 301 haiku by 35 authors (1998); 215 haiku by 60 poets (2008) and 330 haiku by 70 authors (2019).
reminding me I am dust this shaft of sunlight
André Surridge, 1951-2019
number eight wire (2019)
Sandra Simpson (b 1958), who lives in Tauranga, came to haiku in 1993 after meeting Catherine Mair, who lived in nearby Katikati. They began writing linked verse together and in 1995 Simpson had her first haiku published in the inaugural haiku-focused winterSPIN edited by Mair. Simpson started the Haiku NewZ webpages in 2006 after discussion at the first Haiku Festival Aotearoa, joined the Katikati Haiku Pathway Committee as secretary (2006-25), and became the South Pacific nominating editor for the annual Red Moon anthologies in 2012. She was co-editor of the fourth New Zealand haiku anthology, number eight wire (2019) and in 2024 was invited to be patron of the Haiku Down Under online conference. Her collection breath was published in 2011 and since then she has had a haiku blog of the same name.[19]
the road comes
to a ragged end…
tasman sea
Sandra Simpson
Asahi Shimbun (2022)
The first HFA in 2005 was the impetus for the development of the Haiku NewZ website, envisaged as an online noticeboard for the New Zealand haiku community but which quickly became popular with readers around the world. Since its debut in 2006, Haiku NewZ has been hosted on the NZ Poetry Society website. However, in 2024 Simpson created an archive site to hold a showcase of New Zealand poets, the history of the Katikati Haiku Pathway and a history of haiku in New Zealand.[20]
whitebait season …
fishermen fritter away
the day
Margaret Beverland
Katikati Haiku Pathway
The first Haiku Down Under made history for Aotearoa New Zealand with a joint presentation by Courtney and mainstream poet Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa) in what was likely the first time haiku in te reo Māori had been presented on an international stage. Courtney selected the poems, some previously unpublished, which were translated by Rapatahana. A slide was shown containing both versions with either the poet or Courtney reading in English and Rapatahana in te reo.
bellbird korimako
the tree lets go ka tukua te rākau
of a leaf o te rau
Sue Courtney tr Vaughan Rapatahana
alarm & longing (NZPS, 2022)
As a secondary school English teacher Elaine Riddell (b 1948) made NZPS competition material available to her students each year. In 1997, when a haiku competition was held to mark the establishment of a Japanese garden at Hamilton Gardens, Riddell took her Y9[21] class to the Japanese garden to write haiku, which were subsequently entered in the open competition. “One of my students came Second Equal and her haiku is recorded on a bronze plaque in the Japanese Garden, and 13 others had haiku in the competition anthology.” It wasn’t until retiring early at the end of 2004, that Riddell found time to write haiku herself – having a poem chosen for the 2006 NZPS anthology encouraged her to continue. “A major step forward was attending the Haiku Festival Aotearoa in 2008. I learnt so much and met fellow Hamiltonian André Surridge.”
Riddell convenes the e-ripples haiku group which began after the 2012 HFA when she and Surridge drove back to Hamilton together. “There had been other Hamiltonians at the event, including some neither of us had known before so we felt it would be good to have a group.” At the time neither she nor Surridge could go out to meetings so set it up as an online group, adding a tanka sub-group in 2014. In 2024 Riddell was the tanka selector for Gusts (Canada) and Kokako haiku co-editor with Celia Hope, also a member of e-ripples.
towering cumulus
a pukeko shakes out
its tail feathers
Elaine Riddell
First place, Kokako Haiku Competition (2013)
Fibre artist and musician Jenny Fraser (b 1946) was introduced to haiku by André Surridge in 2010, meeting him at a poetry group in Hamilton, and shortly after having her first haiku published in Kokako. Her work appeared in A New Resonance 12: Emerging Voices In English-Language Haiku (Red Moon Press, 2021). Fraser, now living in Mt Maunganui, became tanka editor for the online cattails journal in late 2022.
wide blue sea this moment enough
Jenny Fraser
Acorn 44 (2020)
US-born Doc Drumheller (b 1977) has lived in New Zealand for more than half his life. In 2005 he met Ban’ya Natsuishi at the third Wellington International Poetry Festival, became a member of the World Haiku Association, and has been travelling and performing his haiku and poetry internationally ever since. The founding editor of Catalyst journal (est. 2003), Drumheller has been taking students on ‘haiku hikes’ for more than 20 years as part of his creative writing teaching to children. His haiku books include Election Day of the Dead (Cold Hub Press, 2020) and Drinking with Li Bai: 100 haiku from China and India (Cold Hub Press, 2022).
reading the tea leaves
in the bottom of my cup
the future is green
Doc Drumheller
Drinking with Li Bai: 100 haiku from China and India (Cold Hub Press, 2022)
A teacher of creative writing and an award-winning poet, Kerrin P Sharpe (b 1953), has been teaching haiku to young people since about 2001. Sharpe teaches at a number of schools around Christchurch and is a long-time supporter of the NZPS Junior Haiku Competition, with her students achieving a remarkable track record of success in that competition. In 2014 all the prizes in the junior section, bar one commended, were won by her students. Her students have also performed consistently well in the Vancouver Invitational Haiku Competition, Canada. She doesn’t generally write haiku herself, although renowned poet Bill Manhire said on one occasion that her poetry was what he called “haiku like”.
sudoku evenings
always finish
at nine
Ruth Arnison
number eight wire (2019)
Stephen Bailey (b 1949) came to haiku, using the pen name Hansha Teki, in the lead-up to the 2011 international NaHaiWriMo. “The idea appealed so I sought out and read haiku from every source obtainable. When National Haiku Writing Month started, I was among the first to write my first attempt at haiku in response to the initial prompt for the month and continued on that hands-on learning for several years.” Bailey also assisted Robert D Wilson and Sasa Vazic with updating their Simply Haiku website, learning other aspects and theories regarding haiku in English. “Don Baird and I discussed what we had learned from Wilson and others after Simply Haiku petered out and our ponderings led us to create the online Living Haiku Anthology and the online Under the Bashō haiku journal in 2013.” Through these initiatives Bailey also came to become good friends with Richard Gilbert and Clayton Beach and together they set up the online Heliosparrow Poetry Journal in 2020.
His haiku appeared in A New Resonance 11 (Red Moon Press, 2019), other anthologies and books including Triptych by Kala Ramesh, Don Baird, and Hansha Teki (RMP, 2019), Memories of the Future: Linked and Contrapuntal Poetry by Hansha Teki and Clayton Beach, (Heliosparrow Press, 2020) and For The Time Being by Stephen Bailey (Ararua Books, 2023).
a word
after a word
at war
afterwards
Stephen Bailey
Bones 8 (2015)
Taiwan-born Sherry Grant (b 1976) emigrated as a teenager with her family to New Zealand. A classical musician who performs internationally, she started writing haiku and many other forms of poetry in June 2020, right after the first Auckland Covid lockdown. Sherry and her youngestdaughter Zoe Grant (b 2014), both award-winning haiku poets, have together published Bat Girl (2020), Being Katherine (2023), produced two issues of the online Haiku Zoo Journal for writers 20 years and under, and four issues of the online journal Raining Rengay, as well as hosting seven biannual rengay gatherings online. Sherry Grant presented a rengay workshop at the 2021 Haiku Society of America Virtual Conference and was a co-organiser and presenter with Zoe at the 2022 Haiku Down Under conference.
the crows here
speak another tongue
feathery snow
Sherry Grant
drifting sands haibun poet’s hub (2021)
US-born Katherine Raine emigrated to New Zealand in 1989. She has worked internationally as a landscape architect and garden historian, including 2 years in rural Japan where she began reading haiku. While living in a rainforest farmhouse in the remote south of New Zealand in 2010, Raine started writing her own haiku. These have since appeared around the world in journals and anthologies. After judging the young peoples’ haiku for the NZPS International Poetry Competition in 2016, she wrote Learning How to Write Haiku: A Teacher’s Guide for the NZPS website.[22] Raine judged the 2018 competition’s open section. She lives with the mountains of Central Otago.
between road and bay the old forest one tree wide
Katherine Raine
number eight wire (2019)
End Point
Sadly, the pool of poets appears to be largely static and ageing, and groups wax and wane. However, Aotearoa does have a strong school for young writers in Christchurch that teaches haiku well, and a well-supported annual NZPS Junior Haiku Contest that should, in time, return some of these young people to haiku. In 2024 the country’s one dedicated haiku journal, Kokako, successfully transitioned from print to online with a new editorial team. New Zealand has never had a haiku society, but the Haiku NewZ website has by default largely provided an equivalent focus.
Author’s note: This article is an update of A History of Haiku in New Zealand by Sandra Simpson et al (2019, accessed 20 May 2024). It was written for a mooted book project in the US and appears here with the support of the managing editor.
Footnotes:
[1] However, the word ‘hokku’ was published as early as 1895, referred to in an article about the Far East (NZ Times).
[2] Australia’s first ‘true blue’ published haiku appeared at the astonishingly early date of 12 August 1899 when a poem by Robert Crawford appeared in The Bulletin newspaper, the winner of a competition for haiku with an Australian reference.
[3] The History of Australian Haiku and the Emergence of a Local Accent (2014) by Rob Scott. Accessed 22 May 2024.
[4] American writer Charles Trumbull makes a strong case that Hō-ō, whose works figure prominently in both books, is none other than Stewart himself (who had form when it came to literary hoaxes). Hoaxes in Haiku (Modern Haiku 45.3, 2014). Accessed 26 October 2024.
[5] ‘Breaking the Haiku Mould, or Breeding to a Bloodline’ by Janice M Bostok (2002). Accessed 17 May 2024.
[6] White Heron: the authorised biography of Australia’s pioneering haiku writer Janice M. Bostok (2011) by Sharon Dean. Accessed 19 May 2024.
[7] Ibid.
[8] In 1994, Bostok, Stephen Hobson and John Turner wrote ‘A New Orchid’, believed to be the first published Australian renku, and in 1995 she and Cecily Stanton published ‘The Far Horizon’, the first renku by two Australian women.
[9] William Maxwell Bickerton: A NZ Footnote to the History of Haiku in English by Sandra Simpson. Accessed 12 September 2024.
[10] Hone Tuwhare (1922-2008, Ngāpuhi), the first Māori poet published in English, wrote what he called haiku but which were, in reality, short poems. His first, ‘Haiku (1)’, appeared in 1970. Stop / your snivelling /creek bed: / come rain hail / and flood-water / laugh again
[11] Ruth Dallas Biography. Accessed 29 October 2024.
[12] Unavoidable Incense Kit by Howard Dengate (2013). Accessed 14 November 2024.
[13] Personal correspondence with author, 13 November 2024.
[14] Writing on the Sand, Sounz. Accessed 26 October 2024.
[15] Back to the Future by John O’Connor. Accessed 27 October 2024.
[16] Later renamed ‘Kokako’.
[17] The second, and final, Haiku Sounds in 2000 had Jim Kacian of the US as a guest speaker.
[18] A pōwhiri is a formal welcome of visitors/strangers on to a marae or meeting place with protocols to be followed by hosts and guests. A pōwhiri includes speeches, songs and food. The kuia (elder women) Peterson Butterworth sat with at this pōwhiri, who have all passed on, consented to the haiku’s publication.
[19] breath. Accessed 21 November 2024.
[20] NZ Haiku Showcase. Accessed 24 May 2022.
[21] First year of secondary school, age 12-13.
[22] Learning to Write: A teacher’s guide by Katherine Raine. Accessed 21 November 2024.