Kāpiti College Library

Notes

The fifth annual Kāpiti Coast District Libraries poetry contest – If You’re a Poet, We Want to Know It -- invited poets to submit up to three haiku. Haiku is a traditional short Japanese poetry form which has enjoyed popularity around the world.

Local author Karen Peterson Butterworth describes the process of writing haiku this way: “Haiku is often described as one breath. A haiku moment can occur when you observe two things happening together and make a connection in your mind. To make a haiku, you simply write down what you saw, heard, smelled or touched in plain language. The next step is to trim your haiku to the bare essentials”.

The theme of this year’s contest was Kāpiti – anything about Kāpiti or living in Kāpiti. We invited poets to freely interpret this theme, whether about people the poet knows in the community, familiar places or how Kāpiti makes the poet feel.

We were delighted with the range of subjects in the haiku submitted, anything from the island itself, familiar landmarks and area roads, to the nature of living in the Kāpiti area.