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	The artist, Guy Beining, does not appropriate Pollock's style for the portrait, but something chunkier and more object-oriented.  It most reminds me of the drawings of Bob Dylan, with its similar unlikeliness of line and oddities of objects and their relationships.  there is something perhaps Pollock-like in the face, but it certainly is not slavish in terms of likeness.  So the intent clearly is not the same as Buson's in his protrait of Basho.  And what might have simply been fortuitous, the marker with which Beining adds the poem seems to have been drying up, causing an interesting attenuation of the poem, just as the rain is awakening the night.  A very modern sort of portrait in every sense. We can run the gamut between representational and non-representational iterative haiga as well.  Consider, at the front end of that spectrum, Jeanne Emrich's work entitled winter moon.
If the poem was calligraphed in Japanese instead of English we could believe this was a work from the Edo period.  It has a beautiful control of the image, suggestive but not overlblown, and it links directly with the poem "winter moon . . .  / undisturbed snow / on the cabin steps".  The untrammeled snow, and the uprising of the steps, is a direct invitation to the viewer to enter the world of the painting.  If this sort of work has a flaw, and it's big if, it is that both the painting and the poem draw primarily on the same store of images, and so the one doesn't appreciably enlarge the other.  This example escapes this problem, however, by leaving what's at the upper reach of those steps availabe to the viewer in imagination.  In short, a beautiful and satisfying work. A bit less direct a connection is made in Borivoj Bukva's haiga daljine me zovu.
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