Book review: Pencil Flowers Jail Haiku, by Johnny Baranski

Johnny Baranski passed away in 2018.  He was an anti-war protester who saw his share of life behind prison bars.  In addition to his other stints in jail, he spent time at Lompoc Federal Prison in California for trespassing on a military base to protest a nuclear weapons system.  Dozens of protesters had scaled the barbed wire fence of the Navy base with him -- some were let off on probation, but Baranski and others got the maximum penalty of six months in prison.  Pencil Flowers: Jail Haiku is the result of that sentence.

Baranski was a widely-published poet; Pencil Flowers was his first chapbook.  It's a slim volume featuring 41 poems.  Almost all are haiku, and only one poem runs longer than a page.  The poems are spread out nicely and scattered on the pages like birdseed.

        Brought by the wind

   these tiny seeds have sprouted

        some big black crows.

Baranski's poems are not self-pitying laments, nor are they empty political poems.  Many of them are reminiscent of the work of the great Japanese poet Issa -- they have that special quality of noticing the good in life, even while suffering.

             Jail break

   but the guards do not notice me

             moon gazing.

The haiku in Pencil Flowers are rich in content, so much so that the reader does not pay much attention to form.  Baranski experiments with indents and spacing, as well as punctuation, but none of it takes away from the poems themselves.  (Unfortunately the formatting could not be preserved for the sample poems used here.)  The title poem is accompanied by a quick line-drawing sketch of tall flowers, which also appears on the chapbook's cover and is very Eastern in its use of white space.

An Eastern influence is apparent throughout the chapbook, and Baranski meshes it seamlessly with his own experiences:

       Fluttering in vain

   a butterfly with one wing

   where prison gates meet.

Pencil Flowers: Jail Haiku was published in 1983 by Holmgangers Press.  It is long out of print, but several libraries own copies, and those copies can usually be requested via an inter-library loan.  Used copies will occasionally show up on eBay or Bookfinder.  (They're usually very expensive.)

       In my jail cell--

   a shrinking pencil point

       grows many flowers.

(Originally published on Helium.com, 2009)