Turn to any haiga on this site and the first thing you notice is how little there is to read. Seventeen syllables. An image. A white border around both, the kind that once framed an instant photograph. You can take in a whole haiga (俳画) before you have finished arriving at it — and that brevity is not modesty. It is the entire argument.
A haiga asks for two kinds of skill at once, and they seldom live in the same person. It wants a poet who can weigh a syllable, and it wants an eye that can make an image worth the poem’s company. Most who attempt the form are strong in one and borrow the other. Winston Everlast trained both, and, more unusually, learned each at its source, on opposite sides of the world: the word through a real and traceable line of American haiku running through a small college in Iowa; the image through five years in Japan, a brush, and a priest who taught him to shade a color so that no edge shows.
The word: a line through Iowa
By a quiet accident of history, Dubuque, Iowa, is one of the capitals of English-language haiku. The reason is a single man: Father Raymond Roseliep (1917–1983), a Catholic priest and longtime English professor at Loras College, who began writing haiku around 1960 and was eventually called “the John Donne of Western haiku.” Roseliep taught the form to students at Loras, and one of those students was Bill Pauly (1942–2021) — a poet, a teacher, a close friend of Roseliep’s, and in time the man who ran the haiku workshop at Loras himself for roughly twelve years.
Winston arrived at Loras in 1984 as a creative writing major, into an English department still absorbing a loss: Roseliep had died the previous December. He studied under Bill Pauly — Roseliep’s student and close friend, by then the keeper of the workshop — and so entered the line at the precise moment it was being both mourned and carried forward. That places him, plainly, third in a documented succession: Roseliep to Pauly to Winston, three generations of a poetic discipline handed down in the same small Iowa town. This is where the poems come from: a lineage you could trace in a library long after everyone in it is gone.
The image: a brush in Japan
The other half of a haiga is the picture, and for that Winston went to the source. He graduated from Loras in 1988 and left almost at once for Japan, arriving that September to teach English at Eichi University in Amagasaki, just outside Osaka — a Catholic university that happened to be Loras College’s sister school across the Pacific. The lineage did not so much send him abroad as pass him along its own network. He stayed in Japan for five years, later teaching writing at an international high school in Osaka.
Those years did two things for the work here. They made the forms daily rather than academic — carried in the seasons, the silences, the ordinary counting of syllables — so that the poetry never reached him secondhand. And they put a brush in his hand. Under Father Inoue, a priest at the university as ready to talk about the meeting of Taoism and Catholicism as about Japanese art, Winston took up nihonga (日本画), traditional Japanese painting, and learned katabokashi (片ぼかし): the one-sided gradation that shades a color from full to pale across a single edge so cleanly that no boundary announces itself. He worked it the old two-brush way — one brush laying the pigment down wet while a second, kept nearly dry, chased the first to feather the fade before it set. In the spring of 1990 he showed two nihonga paintings in the Seventeenth Ten’yō-kai (天陽会) Spring Exhibition in Higashi-Osaka, the only Western painter among the exhibitors.
So the two halves of the form reached him from opposite ends of the earth, and each from the unlikely side of its own country. The word came down in Iowa, not on either literary coast; the image was learned in Osaka, not Kyoto. He carried both home to Iowa, where he writes still. When he pairs a poem with a picture now, he is not reaching for an exotic novelty. He is joining two things he already holds.
The bargain with the machine
Now the part that draws the most conversation, and that deserves to be stated without hedging. The images on this site are made with a generative image system. Winston does not hide this, soften it, or treat it as a confession. He calls MidJourney an equal partner in the work — not a brush he wields but a collaborator he works alongside. He brings the poem and the directing vision; the system brings the image; the haiga is the thing they make between them. He has worked this way since the tool first became publicly available in 2022.
It is worth being clear-eyed about why this is not the rupture it might first appear to be. Haiga has always been a collaboration between word and image, and the image has always been made with whatever tool the age provided: a brush, a block print, a camera. Winston, who once worked the brush himself in Japan, simply reached for the tool of his own age; his ease with the new method is not ignorance of the old craft but a choice made in full knowledge of it. The radical thing about haiga was never the technology of the picture; it was the decision to let a poem and an image complete each other rather than illustrate each other. The question worth asking of these works is not what made the image but whether the image and the poem, together, do the thing haiga is supposed to do. Winston is content to be judged on that — and so should you be.
Why seventeen, why now
Winston practices meditation in the tradition taught by S. N. Goenka: first anapanasati, the bare awareness of the breath, then vipassana, the awareness of sensation as it arises and passes. It is a discipline of the present instant, and in that instant two things turn out to be true at once. Everything observed is already passing — anicca, the Pali word for impermanence. And yet that passing moment is also the only one there is: immediate, entire, the whole of what can actually be known. Impermanence and immediacy are not opposites. They are two faces of the same now.
A haiga is an attempt on that now. A seventeen-syllable poem is, among other things, a unit of complete attention — about as much as a person can hold whole in the mind at once, the way you can hold a single breath; and, like a breath, it is entire in the moment and gone as soon as it is taken. These works were made in an era engineered for the opposite: for the fractured glance, the endless scroll, the attention sliced thin and sold off. A haiga asks for the one thing that era was busy making scarce. It asks you to stop at something small and stay there.
Read across all four forms, that request becomes something larger. Haiku asks you to attend to the world; senryu, to other people; katauta, to the person you are speaking to; zappai, to the absurdity you share with everyone in the room. Taken together they are a quiet argument that attention — paid carefully, to the world and to one another — is the thing most worth practicing in a distracted age.
Where the two lines meet
Everything here happens at a confluence. The poems come down through a line of Iowa poets who kept an ancient discipline alive in a place no one would think to look for it. The images come from Japan — from a brush learned by hand at a worktable in Osaka, and now from a machine directed by that same trained eye. Haiga is the one form that asks for both a poem and a picture, made to complete each other, and it turns out to be the one form that needs exactly the two things this maker crossed the world to learn.
Underneath the whole enterprise is a small, stubborn wager, the one every formalist makes: that a thing made small and made carefully will outlast the things made large and made fast. Seventeen syllables, an image, a white border, held still against an age built for speed and distraction. Sit with any one of these works long enough, and you may find yourself agreeing.