Johnny Baranski: 1948–2018

The back cover of Johnny’s last book, White Rose, Red Rose, says that “While the world is under threat from so many dangers . . . the language of flowers will prevail.” This belief was central to Johnny’s life, part of the thread that guided him. In his last few days, Johnny wore a mask to assist his breathing and could not speak. Before deciding to remove the mask, and dying two days later, he motioned to his children for a pencil and paper and started writing. It was his last haiku, his jisei, or death poem. It is a poem filled with hope, the language of flowers, his final gift of haiku sharing:

                one last breath

                before dying—

                plum blossom

Thornton Wilder once wrote that “The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.” The haiku community offers its deepest gratitude to Johnny and his family for his life and for his haiku. When others died, he was always quick to post the following message on Facebook as an expression of his faith: “Eternal rest, grant unto him O Lord and let perpetual light shine upon him.” Now it is Johnny’s turn to receive this blessing. May the perpetual light shine upon Johnny Baranski.

—Michael Dylan Welch

The preceding memorial, in a shorter version, appeared in Frogpond 41:1, Winter 2018, pages 104–108.

Johnny Wayne Baranski (1948–2018)

Johnny W. Baranski, age 69, died Jan. 24, 2018, of COPD, surrounded by his children. A poet of haiku for over 40 years, Johnny published eight books to date; his work has also appeared in many dozens of journals and websites around the world. Many of his poems were written while serving time in prison for acts of conscience including nonviolent resistance to war and the Trident nuclear weapon system. He lived his life with humility, friendship and love in service of the Gospel of Christ. A devout Catholic, Johnny served the poor for many years as a member of the Catholic Worker Community in Portland.        Born in Chicago, Johnny moved to Portland in the early 1970s after graduating with an English degree from Loyola University. Last residing in Vancouver, Johnny was a parishioner at St. James Proto-Cathedral. He was also an active member of the Haiku Society of America, Haiku Canada, and the Portland Haiku Group. Johnny was well-known for his love of the Chicago Cubs and Chicago Blackhawks and his interest and ability to identify classic cars no matter what condition they were in.        Johnny was preceded in death by his parents, John and Marie Baranski of Cook County, Ill. He is survived by his sister, Gail Baranski; his children, Margo Williams (Byron), Amy Baranski (Bob), and Michael Baranski (Chelsea); their mother, Grace Jewett; and three grandsons, Ty, Caleb, and Japhy.

Memorial Mass is at 3:30 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 10, 2018, at the Trappist Abbey, 9200 N.E. Abbey Road, Carlton, OR. Committal will be earlier that day at 10 a.m. at St. Mary Catholic Cemetery in Stayton, Oregon.

Please sign the online guest book at www.oregonlive.com/obits.

The preceding obituary appeared in The Oregonian, February 2–4, 2018. Additional obituaries also appeared at Stayton Events and in The Columbian.

From Mann Library Feature, June 2017

        in one breath

        a lifetime

        mayfly

Johnny Baranski has been writing haiku and its related forms since 1975. His work has appeared in the following hard copy and online journals and anthologies: A Hundred Gourds, Brussels Sprout, Bones, Bottle Rockets, Cattails, Contemporary Haibun, Dragonfly: A Quarterly of Haiku, Frogpond, Haibun Today, Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, Kamesan’s World Haiku Anthology on War, Violence and Human Rights Violation, Kernels, Mayfly, Modern Haiku, Montage: The Book (The Haiku Foundation), Moonset, Multiverses, No Longer Strangers: Haiku Northwest 25th Anniversary Anthology, Prune Juice, The Heron’s Nest, The Living Haiku Anthology, The Red Moon Press Anthology of English Language Haiku, Under the Bashō, and Wind Chimes.

Long involved in the anti-war and Catholic Worker movements many of his poems have been written while serving time in prison for acts of nonviolent resistance to militarism and nuclear weapons. A father and grandfather he is currently retired and living in the Pacific Northwest USA. (Mr. Baranski is on Facebook [Johnny Baranski] and Twitter [@haikumonk].)

Awards and Other Honors: Mr. Baranski’s collection Convict’s Shoot The Breeze was selected as a 2001 Virgil Hutton Memorial Award Haiku Chapbook winner. More recently his poems have received both Sakura Awards and honorable mentions for the 2011, 2012, and 2013 Vancouver (BC) Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational in the USA category. Along with Margaret Chula he judged the Haiku Society of America’s Harold G. Henderson Haiku Contest in 2013. He was editor of the Haiku Foundation’s Per Diem feature on the theme of war and peace for August 2014.

Books Published: Poems from Prison (Sunburst Press, Portland, Oregon, 1979); Pencil Flowers: Jail Haiku (Holmgangers Press, Whitethorn, California, 1983) [out of print]; Silent Silos: A CounterBOMB Haiku Sequence (Sunburst Matchbooks, Portland, Oregon, 1985); Fish Pond Moon (Sunburst Matchbooks, Portland, Oregon, 1986); Hitch Haiku (Sunburst Matchbooks, Portland, Oregon, 1987); Convicts Shoot the Breeze (Saki Press, Normal, Illinois, 2001) [out of print]; Just a Stone’s Throw (Pinch Book Series No. 12 edited by Vincent Tripi, Tribe Press, Greenfield, Massachusetts, 2006). Trifolds: First Snow (Teahouse Pamphlets, Portland, Oregon, 2003); Autumn Leaves (selected poems for the Seabeck Haiku Getaway, 2012); Paper Cranes (selected haiku for Haiku North America, 2013); and Beads of Glass: A Rosary Haiku Sequence (Seabeck Haiku Getaway, 2013). Broadside: Blossoming Pear (Lilliput Review #191, edited by Don Wentworth, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, 2013). He has a new haiku manuscript, Fireweed, that has recently been accepted for publication by Folded Word Press.

The preceding biographical information appeared with Johnny Baranski’s Mann Library feature in June of 2017 (lightly edited here).

Spotlight: The Haiku of Johnny Baranski

Originally published in Modern Haiku 46:2, Summer 2015, pages 45 to 54.

        by Paul Miller

Johnny Baranski was born and raised in an ethnically Polish neighborhood in Chicago. In 1963 he entered the seminary of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago where he received a classic liberal arts education, studying, in addition to the basic high school courses, Latin and Greek, and was exposed to the rigorous discipline of seminary life. After graduating in 1966, he was accepted for studies in the seminary’s secondary school, a college affiliated with Chicago’s Loyola University. He chose English Literature as his major, with a minor in philosophy, and he began writing poetry that was influenced by the imagists and the work of two Jesuit priests: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Daniel Berrigan.

His time in secondary school corresponded with America’s engagement in Vietnam and Baranski became involved in the anti-war and civil rights movements of the era which eventually led to his involvement in nonviolent direct action. He was first arrested in 1971 for reading the names of the war dead in a local Selective Service Office. He also began to participate in “draft board raids” largely conducted by Catholic priests, nuns, and lay persons including Father Berrigan. In 1974 he was sentenced to one year in Federal Prison for the destruction of government property. This corresponded with a personal shift from the priesthood to family life, and he married and relocated to the Pacific Northwest. He served his time at the Federal Penitentiary at McNeil Island on Puget Sound in Washington State, where he found the discipline of his Catholic experiences beneficial for adapting to the rigors of prison life.

After prison, Baranski settled with his wife in Portland, Oregon and continued writing. It was there that he came into contact with haiku through Peter Pauper Press. He also learned of the national haiku journal Dragonfly whose editor, Lorraine Ellis Harr, also lived in Portland. She suggested additional reading material and he published his first haiku in Dragonfly’s summer 1975 issue.

In 1977 he and his wife welcomed their first child while they ran a Catholic Worker House of Hospitality and focused on resisting nuclear weapons, in particular the Trident Submarine and Weapons System based on the Hood Canal in Bangor, Washington. In 1978 he was arrested at the Trojan Nuclear Station at Rainier, Oregon, and again in 1979 at the Trident Base in Bangor. He received a six-month sentence for the latter to be served at the Federal Prison in Lompoc, California. It was at Lompoc that his haiku came into their own, and in the spirit of Ho Chi Minh’s prison diary Baranski began keeping a prison diary of his own peppered with haiku. Harr, who was also an anti-nuke ally, began publishing them in Dragonfly. She also introduced him to the work of Marlene Mountain, Ty Hadman, and Ruth Yarrow, all of whom became important influences. A good portion of the Lompoc haiku appeared in his first collection Pencil Flowers: Jail Haiku. Upon release from Lompoc he was exclusively writing haiku. After Harr shared with Baranski a counter-bomb project she had been involved with that combined song and poetry, he wrote Silent Silos: A Counter-BOMB Haiku Sequence that was released as a chapbook in 1985.

Throughout the 1980s Baranski continued his anti-nuclear activities, which resulted in additional jail time and haiku composition. His final jail sentence came in 1987: a sixty-day term in the Snohomish County Jail at Everett, Washington for sitting on the tracks and blocking a train with nuclear weapons material from entering the Trident base. From that experience came the sequence “Snohomish County Jail Haiku” which appeared in the spring 1988 issue of Frogpond. By this time his family had grown to three children, so he cut back on his activism.

Baranski took a break from haiku in the 1990s to focus on his family, returning to win the Grand Prize in the 2000 Virgil Hutton Haiku Memorial Award Chapbook Contest. The collection, composed of new haiku and haiku from the Snohomish sequence, was titled Convicts Shoot the Breeze. His time in various jails and prisons over the years had made a deep impression on Baranski, and he mined those experiences for his 2006 chapbook Just a Stone’s Throw. In 2011 he published another jail haiku sequence which incorporated the lyrics of the “Star Spangled Banner” and in 2013 he published Paper Cranes, a trifold for Haiku North America that contained anti-war haiku.

While Baranski has published many successful haiku on more traditional subjects, he is best known for his haiku on nuclear missiles and his experiences in America’s penal system. Yet such weighty topics never overwhelm the poetry itself, and surprisingly, the haiku are often humorous. Baranski notes a distinction between activist haiku and haiku written by an activist. “To me it’s all about telling the truth,” he says. “. . . the truth about war and peace, about race and poverty, about love and hate, about freedom and responsibility, about the beautiful and the ugly, about crime and punishment, about religious and secular life, about nature and stewardship.” Yet he is aware of the perils of writing “about” a subject. Ruth Yarrow, in an essay about anti-war haiku, states that “It is a challenge to write from particular experiences . . . so that the poem doesn’t shout like a bumper sticker but reverberates like haiku.” Or as Baranski puts it: “I’ve found that the haiku I’ve written which hit the reader over the head on an issue are, more often than not, bad haiku.”

from Pencil Flowers (1983)

A few guards

overlooking the prison camp,

mountain summit.

   the late summer sun—

not afraid to dance on rolls

      of prison razor barb

   In mid-day heat

a B-52 Bomber drops

      the only shade

caught stealing

a few moments of sleep—

guntower guard

 Soon forgotten—

all this effort to peel

 a jail store orange.

      In my jail cell—

a shrinking pencil point

   grows many flowers.

from Silent Silos (1985)

Fine spring weather—

silent Titan missile silos

butterflies emerge

Missile silos—

About them the farmer

harrowing the soil

This heat!

On the wheatfield missile silo

praying mantis

Released by the fence

around the missile silo—

the farmer’s bladder

Nuclear missile—

the face of the enemy

is my own

On death row: two, four,

six, eight, ten, twelve . . .

snow-covered missile silos

from “Snohomish County Jail Haiku”

Frogpond 11:2 (1988)

   Starting a new month

in Snohomish County Jail;

      same old tea bag

   April sun slanting

across the exercise yard

      jail-bar shadows

          Little ladybug

caught after visiting hours:

     doing jail time, too

Sixty-day jail term—

as it grows shorter

my growing beard

                This heat!

snow-clad mountains framed

      by my jail cell window

        Basketball stops

    in the exercise yard—

convicts shoot the breeze

from Convicts Shoots the Breeze (2002)

From the prison watchtower

there is a very good view

of the moon too

sleepless night—

moon-cast cell bars’ shadows

lay on the stone cot

Chilly morning—

      in the jailhouse spider web

hangs a fly

From the jailyard

the sound of rioting

hailstones

     The road home

beyond the prison wall:

     deepening snow

Snohomish County Jail:

even in this place

haiku moments

from Just a Stone’s Throw (2006)

Easter sunrise;

gun towers overshadow

the prison graveyard

convicts and guards

in the prison graveyard

same headstones

here yesterday

gone today

snow in the prison graveyard

just over these walls

the grass is greener

in the prison graveyard

Memorial Day

in the prison graveyard

unknown soldiers

in the prison graveyard

just as he was in life—

convict 14302

from “Star Spangled Haiku”

Frogpond 34:1 (2011)

by the dawn’s early light

one convict makes

a break for it

inmate laundered socks

were so gallantly streaming

from D Block’s third tier

at the twilight’s last gleaming

moonbeams show the way

home from jail

gave proof through the night

that our flag was still there

guard tower searchlights

oh say does that star-spangled

banner yet wave behind

jail barbed wire

o’er the land of the free

jam-packed jails

harvest moon

from Paper Cranes (2013)

chrysanthemum garden

in this world too

bomb makers

Memorial Day—

rows of veterans shoulder

closed umbrellas

ornamental poppies another flag-draped coffin

across the autumn sky

fighter jets streak north

geese heading south

paper lanterns

do you know how many died

at Hiroshima

for a moment

the war be damned

cherry blossoms