About Winston Everlast

A haiga (the old Japanese pairing of a short poem with a picture, roughly four centuries old) 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. This note is mostly the story of those two inheritances, and of what he makes from them now.

The haiga on this site, it should be said at once, are not laid down by that trained hand. Everlast composes them with MidJourney, a generative image system he has worked with since its public release in the summer of 2022 and treats as an equal collaborator rather than a tool. To some readers that will sound like a contradiction of everything just claimed. It is not — but the reason has to wait for the two lineages that make sense of it.

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, informally and then formally, 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. Pauly was known especially for haiku and senryu, the two forms most concerned with the natural world and with human nature respectively.

Winston Everlast arrived at Loras in 1984 as a creative writing major, into an English department still absorbing a loss. Roseliep had died the previous December, and the shake-up of his passing was felt keenly by the people who had known him and learned from him; the man who had quietly made the place a haiku capital was suddenly gone. Everlast 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 Everlast, three generations of a poetic discipline handed down in the same small Iowa town, each carrying it to the next. This is where the poems come from: a lineage you could trace in a library long after everyone in it is gone, which is exactly the sort of root system a body of work wants if it intends to last.

The other half of a haiga is the picture, and for that Everlast went to the source. He graduated from Loras in 1988 and left almost at once for Japan, arriving that September to teach English as an assistant professor at Eichi University in Amagasaki, just outside Osaka — a Catholic university founded by the Diocese of Osaka and, as it happened, Loras College’s sister school across the Pacific. The lineage did not so much send him abroad as pass him along its own network, from one small Catholic college in Iowa to its counterpart in Japan. When Eichi offered to keep him on a five-year contract, he turned it down (the choice of a maker over a professor) but did not leave: he stayed on at the university another year in residence, and in Japan for several more, later teaching writing at an international high school in Osaka.

Those years did two things for the haiga on this site. 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; he learned it where it grew. And they put a brush in his hand. Under Father Inoue (a priest at the university, and a man as ready to talk about the meeting of Taoism and Catholicism as about Japanese art and culture), Everlast 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. It is a discipline with deep roots in Japanese art, the same instinct for atmospheric transition that lends a Hokusai sky its depth, and it belongs to the hand-made image-craft that haiga has always leaned on, the very tradition Bashō and Buson worked in, Buson a professional painter before he was ever canonized as a poet.

Nor was this only private study. 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. One of the two is reproduced here: three trumpet daffodils above a fan of long leaves, some deep green and some a pale blue-green, the color drifting from one to the other without a seam, a small red seal at the lower right that reads ニコラス. He would not stay with that brush. But he knew it in his hands, and the soft-edged shading it taught him, long before he ever traded it for another.

Daffodils. Nihonga on shikishi, a study in katabokashi. Japan, 1989.

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 — not the city foreigners went to in search of Japan, but the working one next door, which kept few of them and courted none. He carried both home to Iowa, the place that had, against all odds, become the American outpost of these forms, and 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.

Most people know one Japanese short form by name, haiku, and assume the rest are variations on it. They are not. Everlast works in four distinct forms, and part of what this site does is keep them distinct. The differences are not technicalities. Each form points its attention at a different part of human experience, and reading them together is the closest thing these haiga offer to a map of what seventeen syllables can be made to hold.

The unifying move — and it is a genuine artistic choice, worth flagging for anyone studying this work later — is that Everlast renders all four forms at the same measure: seventeen English syllables, five-seven-five. He defends the discipline the way one would defend the sonnet or the villanelle: not as a cage but as a fixed form, a known shape that gives the freedom inside it somewhere to push against. The count is the craft. Seventeen syllables is his fourteen lines.

The haiga on this site are made with a generative image system. Everlast 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, which makes him an early adopter of a practice that, at the time, had no settled etiquette and a great deal of controversy attached.

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. Everlast, 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 best haiga has never been a poem with a picture stapled on. It is two utterances that mean more together than apart. By that standard, 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. Everlast is content to be judged on that, and so should you be.

There is a reason the brevity matters beyond tradition, and it has to do with the particular noise of the moment these were made in.

Everlast practices meditation in the tradition taught by S. N. Goenka: first anapanasati, the bare awareness of the breath, and then vipassana, the awareness of sensation as it arises and passes in the body, the deep reactions the tradition calls sankhara surfacing into feeling and passing away. It is a discipline of the present instant: an awareness of the moment, of the breath, of the sensation, returned to again and again, resting on nothing but what is happening now and only now. And in that instant two things turn out to be true at once. Everything observed is already passing. This is anicca, the Pali word for impermanence, the first thing the practice teaches. 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. The form exists to catch a single instant, the one before it passes, and its whole power depends on the instant being at once fully present and already gone. 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. Anicca only names what the form already knew. Everlast’s wager is that the most honest response to a vanishing present is neither to clutch at it nor to look past it, but to attend to it completely, to give the instant the whole of one’s regard precisely because it will not stay.

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.