What I Learned in the Past Year, Age 46 & 47

by Jefferson Hansen

                                        for Bruce & Roger, thank you

You are never too old to learn.

You can trust nobody.

You need to trust some simply to survive.

There is no bottom line.

You can never know anyone.

You can never know yourself.

Those you know best can always surprise you, for good and ill.

There is no bottom line.

When the bottom falls out, you only go down as far as the next floor.

That floor, too, can fall out.

There is no such thing as earth.

Freedom often appears when you have very little left to lose.

You always have more to lose.

Even after death you can lose dignity, depending on what they do to your corpse.

I am a hippy at heart—give me value over money anyday.

I will wave my freak flag high.

Destruction can be the most loving and creative act.

You might as well respect yourself; if you don't, nobody will.

People are capable of anything, from sublime charity to sublime cruelty.

Anyone is capable of anything, given certain circumstances.

Don’t think you know yourself.

We construct ideas of how we are that have a tenuous hold on facts in context.

We are stupider than we think.

We think we behave according to our beliefs.

We are smarter than we allow ourselves to think.

The person you lie to the most is yourself.

The next moment is a gift, and a curse.

You can depend on nobody.

Sometimes you can depend on yourself.

Everybody needs someone else, even a hermit.

If you want something done, then you need to get busy.

Desperation, properly focused, can be a great motivator.

You may always be surprised by finding what is your calling.

Whining, when done with nuance and theatrical flair, can manipulate people.

Subtle flamboyance and histrionics are often, sadly, convincing.

The only reward for doing good is knowing you did it.

There is no substitute for the word ‘love’. Those who say writers shouldn’t use it are wrong.

Sometimes your head has no top.

A kind smile can mean everything, for a while.

Every kind smile ends.

There are people who would rather you not exist.

You can take nothing for granted.

We can’t live without assumptions.

I wish someone could see me as I see myself.

I can’t see myself.

‘I’ is an evolution.

You need to stop thinking the horizon can be reached.

You are where you are where you are.

Given the right effort and perceptive angle, anything can be beautiful.

But crazy people are sometimes simply crazy, sometimes not.

Trust your instincts, not your desires.

Nothing is exactly effortless.

When an old friend is on the other line, you can finally relax.

The human capacity for forming groups from which to hate can never be underestimated.

People are stupid.

People are too smart for their own good.

Kindness pops up in the stangest places.

There is no such thing as ‘good-bye’.

Outcroppings by Jonathan Brannen

 time is transparent

                        as though I were an empty street

                        or an empty sheet of speechless paper

                                                arrested by scenery

                        as the plane takes off

                        subdivisions look

                        like crop circles below

distance

            this dance

            of dislocation

                                    there is a sequel

                                    to these events

                                   

odd numbers

silent letters

the local sense

of things

                                                two images

                                                blocks in space

                        achieving

                        nothing

to distinguish between margins and boundaries

                                                no longer sleep

                                                just inertia

to protect actual truths as much as lost opportunities sometimes it is neces­sary to forget the dif­ference between the possible and the possibilities

the unpainted pier

on the distant shoreline

the smell of rain

moving in

a steady light now

scattered in time

another moment

for reflection

the shiny surface

                        of direct objects

                                                the fiction of history

what eyes conceal

            of voices that will not be denied

                        of choices despite history

of lives that have

taken place

every representation

is a distortion

a change of tone

built up in absence

of speech

                                    what space is for

                                    for what space is

                                    for space is what

                                    what space is for

vanishing on waking

images hard to retain

                                    to construct a refuge

                                    of incongruity

                                    an artifact constructed

                                    from fictions of youth

                                           summer and salary

time is solid

                 rain hangs

                 in the air

                                    everything that is

                                    is as blind as the rain

_______________________

See Brannen in AlteredScale.com 1 and AlteredScale.com 2.

Jonathan Brannen is the author of twelve volumes of poetry and five books of visual literature. His most recent collections are this is visual poetry (this is visual poetry chapbooks, Kingston PA, 2010), a sequence of full color word art,Mona Lisa (Avantacular Press, 2010), a sequence of visual poems he created combining computer constructed images and photocopying between 1975 and 1982, and Deaccessioned Landscapes, a collection of technically innovative sonnets (Chax Press, Tucson, AZ, 2005). His poetry and fiction have been anthologized in five countries on three continents and translated into two languages. He grew up in Florida and currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Vanishing Point by Jonathan Brannen

on the edge of seeing

their actual occuring

the event

not the observer

“takes place”

a sense of space within

geographical space

sunlight diffused rooms                                                                                             --

one step follows another

proceeding

                        no step escapes the preceding

{what solitude is meant to designate}

                       

                        desire moves like a verb

                        at its most noun-like

                        desire desires desiring

                        desire moves like a noun

                        at its most verb-like

                        desire desires desiring

                                                when if not when

its inaccurate light gathering

                                                                across

                                        the paradox of becoming

the present precluding past and future

            from the farthest reaches of my heart

            catch

                                                my breath

the circles I move in

                        {the individual as a montage

                                    of loosely assembled parts}

mental postures

evoking ritual from routine

                        the mask wears the role

                        the player wears the audience

the passengers develop destination syndrome

now more than ever

they never blink

                        they never lie

                        in case it collapses under scrutiny

                        yesterday resembles yesterday

            alien glyphs of remnant ice

            rising and falling on the river surface

            seen from the bridge above

            shaped by currents below

winter channels the basic colors

self holds a problematic place

                        painting as a light source

                        the lighted object seen in profile

a hundred doors

                                                viewer and vanishing

point

Housekeeping—this blog is associated with AlteredScale.com multimedia arts journal

1. Please check out the AlteredScale.com Facebook page to see
            >who is lined up for AlteredScale.com 2,
            >our new "cover" photo by Andrea Canter,
            >and my introductory video to the issue.
"Like" us if you are into that sort of thing—and if you're not, you could "Like" us anyway.

2. If you can afford it, please donate to the journal. I will use the money to pay for webspace, to buy a new camera to record events, and to pay for equipment to use in our reading series. I will also use it for transportation for out-of-town readers, such as Californian Mark Wallace—featured artist for AlteredScale.com 3, out in March 2013.

3. AlteredScale.com 2 is almost complete. I just have to do a little bit of editing and then add in a bunch of links—yeah, yeah, the fun stuff. This might be my obsessive hobby, but even golfers—those old duffers—I assume get annoyed with the driving range, sometimes. (I could never play that game: chasing around a little white ball. Yuch. I'd rather take a walk in the woods. But if you like it—have fun.)

4. If you are in AlteredScale.com 2, you can expect galley proofs within the week.

Adios for now,

Jeff

The Magnolias Perfom "Neighborhood Patrol"

"Neighborhood Patrol" by The Magnolias. (Click on box in lower right of video for full screen.)

7th Street Entry
Minneapolis, July, 2012

Filmed by Jefferson Hansen

More videos by The Magnolias, legendary second-wave punk band, will appear in AlteredScale.com 2, together with analysis and commentary.

John Freeman: Songwriter, Rhythm Guitar, Vocals

Kyle Killorin: Bass

Mike Leonard: Lead Guitar, Vocals

Pat McKenna: Drums 

The Magnolias webpage

Jefferson Hansen reading "The Branded Woman" at The Artist's Quarter, April 2012

The Branded Woman & Other Poems

by Jefferson Hansen

$5 postpaid (check to "Jefferson Hansen")

Jefferson Hansen

TheAlteredScalePress

PO Box 8303

Mpls, MN 55408

Poem by John Havelda

 drunk on white noise and red pessimism

Switch off the seminar music

Do not let children play with American superstitions

Sing for a dog in a mirror of eyes poor school

Stock houses and empire deserts with all you can eat piano bars

Lunge langue urge to understandable marionettes as unpretentious as glanced meteorites

Put it in a vat of home wired misanthropy

Do not overlook the grumpiness of broken blues chords receiving life affirming graver evils

Predict specific subhuman sub-genres of acoustic instruments

Simplify the bleak and bereft sheer frost of this putative taste boundary

Peel a slew of heretofores of births and rebirths fatally unreadable and terminally unpublishable

Emulate immaculate bulk and mountainous undergrounds

Snip the ego off the syncopated kick drum

Rather than merely hear a tear drop, stake a patch of parched land available for download

Trouble aesthetics with flight and pursuit

Avoid blurring fusing flecks and flickering particles

Stir dots with curls and calligraphic gestures rather than yearning arpeggios

Walk just one street away from the obstreperous clusters verging on psychedelia old and new

Engage in slow slurry conversations on an ankle or the like

Grope at a man made mandarin movie, static nudge and more

Broadcast limited tender buttons, rising stains and Romanian dervishes

Except in close-minded silence and stoic crafts, pluck plot turns from the famous using small sombre sounds

Poignantly drizzle the unacceptable once upon a time share

Package gold and green boredoms

After a string of buoyant disquieting settings cash in two black gloves for arcane chansons

Let’s just not say that relentless vocalising underneath muted brass protocols caused brooding sentient beings

Provided that quirks as true opera exacerbate the queasily reminiscent guess which woven aftermath skewed echoed space

Now see it now don’t

After three days of diffusion, reverb, distortion and delay float “Float My Childhood on Rural Norfolk”

Whenever a slab of early vintage glass drawn by a Palestinian pianist persuades a wave of buoying congas breathe less freely

Never impose chimes on nocturnal creatures

Mangle the plain truth

Scatter squeaks of alluring numerals

Gaze straight into the sheaves of concrete poetry falling back on weak cucumber humour

Whether or not the Quack Quack Gallery exhibits its boisterous ebb and flow its haphazard plonking unsettle digital debris

Sample road drills coffee grinders and acoustic computer with pinprick focus on a brass outburst

Under another name hack or saw at rickshaw spokes

Work in gargantuan yard sounds

Beware of mumbled utterances that rhyme with “it’s a rich metaphor for the inner landscape”

Wander on a docked ship or an elongated drum sculpture

Unless a plum job comes up perch between smeared frenzies and unrest

Stock up on delicate dialectics or twist and shout

Watch out for saxophonists with hair on the wrong objects

Settle for vulgar sensationalism or the rough and righteous but pay no more than ten richly lacquered pieces

Only flinch if perfect and polite

Wink at the soulless meld of the bleakest moments when the dark thoughts descend

When twice the age of a mental fiddler spare the scratchings and rattle the box

Gurgle on the doom laden

With race now based in Southern Italy bolt on Chinese boxes

After a boppish turn of phrase jab the repeat button

Sitting at a forlorn piano burble away and call it impressionistic audio collage taken to transcendental aesthetic edginess

If the dialogue becomes exquisitely subdued call out “Adieu les jours”

As soon as the bucolic chirrups glimpse through the heaving and excitable crowd don’t hear the notes

Strum erratic junk culture

Reflect that Australian flavour and pack up your samples in your old kit bag

Careening around a small stage display shamanic multiphonics

Capsize the sound of big ugly orthodoxies under the sweaty arches of a railway bridge

Hotly debate a drizzly grey day of composers drunk on white noise and red pessimism

_____________________

Visual poetry by John Havelda will appear in AlteredScale.com 2.