Tom Painting's haiku

Modern Haiku, vol. 39.3, Autumn 2008

The favorite haiku of the summer 2008 issue, we read on page 5, is this one by Tom Painting:

year’s end
the weight of pennies
in the mason jar

We had a good conversation here at SIP about this haiku. We noted the economy of the form – a sort of lack of playfulness that this haiku shares with many contemporary haiku. That said (and it alone is not a bad thing at all), the sharpness of the division between the short line – “year’s end” -- and the base produces a real “gap” between the two parts, which is essential to haiku structure. After the short line, there’s just no telling what may come.

Formally speaking, then, at first glance this haiku is a model of a certain conservative type.

In experiencing the gap, what comes “at the end” is a solid, somewhat dour image: a mason jar with pennies in it. Presumably a lot of pennies, since the emphasis is on “weight.” Usage points in the direction of “heaviness” and the vernacular turn adds to the realism, as does the naming of the jar. The specificity of “mason jar” accentuates the no-nonsense sturdiness, and suggests that something else could have been in that jar – preserves perhaps!

In any event, no Greek urn this!

The reader may reconstruct the moment of the haiku as the “lifting” of the jar, the judgment of the year’s collection. We are not told if the weight is sufficient to generate any pleasure in the lifting.

Behind the poem, or assumed by it, is the maxim: Time is money.

We could imagine other versions of the haiku. For example,

year’s end
the pennies in a mason jar
how heavy


Does the ultimate value of the haiku as written by Mr. Painting depend on the quality of insight afforded by the maxim: time is money? We believe most readers would reject that idea. Most people prefer their haiku “open-ended,” even when, or perhaps because, that means they need not come to any conclusions about its meaning.

Short of such conclusions, we note that its formal structure embodies the “go and return” movement commented on early in the tradition (see Keji Kawamoto, The Poetics of Japanese Verse). The “flatness” of the base or two-line segment is thrown into relief by the superposed line –that is, the base is animated by the “return” to the base of the consciousness now informed by the complete haiku. According to Kawamoto, this “dualty” has penetrated to the core of the Japanese haiku’s structure of meaning. We believe "go and return" is essential to haiku in English.


Back to the issue of meaning: Read with the full ambiguity of the word “end” -- embracing both the notion of cessation and the notice of fulfilled intention -- the haiku as Mr. Painting wrote it may be an example of—or a comment on -- nihilism: the denial of any meaning to time beyond the clock-work units of time. But since “spots of time” or moments of aesthetic arrest are part of haiku heritage in its metaphysical dimension (including the profound background of Zen), the haiku can be seen as a resister of such interpretive habits, and thus a “radical” poem intent on shaking up the tradition of sentiment. And it may also be seen as an avoidance of the richness of the paradox of “end,” a refusal to get involved in metaphysics. We consider it a flaw that one cannot finally decide from the poem itself.