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Please give a short bio of yourself for our readers. Who the hell am I? My name is John Powers, I am a poet, a performance poet, a slam poet, a poet... with a day job. The day job is being the strange dude sitting in the corner of the corporate cube farm trying not to talk to all of the conservative people shuffling by. You see, this is my problem, in the poetry community, I look like the middle class white bread boy who just fell out of a Gap billboard. In the corporate world, I'm the weird one. The one the managers think twice about sending on business trips because they don't want me running off every evening to the nearest 'beatnik bar'. (The people I work with use quotations in the air a lot, it's contagious. RUN!!) This company I work for has 65,000 employees. SIXTY FIVE THOUSAND! When we finally destroy ourselves and turn this planet into a Matchlight Charcoal BriquetteT, it won't be because of some dim witted delegating president *Bush* *cough* *cough, or even because of an Osama Beer Ladle terrorist type, but a company three times the size of mine trying to avert a hostile take over. Trust me. Who am I? I'm John Powers, from Rhode Island. I run the Providence Poetry Slam, I ran the National Poetry Slam when it came to Providence in 2000. I have a CD of poetry and music out there on Amazon, I write, I read aloud, I perform, I work, I love, I have a cat named Taylor and he has his own diary. Nice to meet you. I feel a few years older than sand today. Now I know 30 is not that old, old is how you act, blah blah blah... Today I feel old. Trust me. Today I don't feel like smoking. I didn't even think about it until now. Damn. I want a smoke. Why did you choose this username? Because it is my name. Everyone being anonymous on the internet is strange. You can pretend to be whomever you want. One day I could be John, the next day I could imitate GingerBug and it would be hard to tell. I use my real name because I'm not afraid of someone matching my real life persona with that of my on-line one. My opinions and my views are just that - mine - no matter where they're expressed. Why do you keep a diary online? I started this diary because I wasn't writing much. I used to perform a lot. I've featured in NYC Manhattan, all over Massachusetts, Washington DC, Vermont, basically the entire east coast... and then I stopped writing. I became burnt out. So I started writing my diary as a journal. Sort of a poetic sketch book. A lot of the entries I write contain bits and pieces that end up in performance pieces I read aloud from stage. I also like the ability for people I don't see often to be able to see what is going on with me. That's fun. I tell them to just go to the web address and they can see what the latest drama is with me. Your layout is certainly unique - visitors can customize it during those bored "nothing-else-to-do-on-the-internet" - moments. How important do you think a layout is for a web-based diary? Would you also comment on yours? A layout isn't that important in my opinion. Other than a layout needing to be readable and not annoying to the reader, it doesn't matter much past that. If you think about it, after you've been reading a diary for a while, you almost ignore the layout and just focus on the words. The words and what you are saying is the most important. With my diary, when you go to the bottom of the page, you can choose between something like 15 different layouts. The words are the same, but the font, graphics, width, backgrounds and styles change. I added all of this and spent all the hours developing the JavaScript for all of them for really one reason and that is because tastes vary. A reader can choose what they most prefer and then not worry about it... You were raised by women as you were growing up. Did you have a male role-model? If so, who? I would have to say Favio. Last valentines day, I was watching TV. Hair Spray was on, I watched a bit, then VH1 had Marriages of the Rock Stars of Yesteryear or something like that and while I was watching it, I came close to jumping in the river that ran behind my apartment at the time. So... I continued flipping until I came to the ultimate in Valentines Day Rhetoric: FAVIO - THE LIFE STORY!!!! I managed to watch it out of pure morbid curiosity (read: I really wanted to kill myself) until I heard the line spoken "Favio to this day is still a person trying to escape from the chains of his own manhood." followed up a few seconds later by "Some women will have an orgasm if he just touches their hand.." If that's not a male role model, I don't think I'll ever have one. Why have you never met your half-brother? Because he's dead. Heh. No. I don't really know. He is part of my father's life and since my father isn't part of mine, it would make sense that I would not know him. I've never met my father's second wife either. In fact the only time I've seen my father since 1975 was when my grandparents - his parents died. They died a few years apart, so I saw him at two separate funerals for a few minutes both times. I suppose if my grandparents died in a horrible kitchen grease fire or something similar, I would have only seen him once in the past 25 years. You don't miss what you don't know. You write and perform poetry. What is Poetry Slam? What is a poets slam? A poetry slam is a verbal boxing match between poets. Poets take the stage one by one performing work that they have writing themselves. There are 5 judges selected at random in the audience. These judges score the poets poem based 1/2 on performance and 1/2 on literary merit - on a scale of 0 to 10. 0 sucks. 0 sucks so bad the poet's mother should have never been born. A 10 is amazing. A 10 is so amazing that random people are having orgasms in public. Usually there are 3 rounds where low scoring poets are eliminated from round to round. It all culminates in a winner who usually gets some nominal cash prize. What is a poets slam? A poetry slam is a mock game show designed to keep the audience interested so that they will actually listen to poetry for an hour and a half. The format also attracts people who would otherwise never attend a poetry reading. Why do you write the "jaded and angsty horoscopes"? What is your horoscope for this week? I am a Sagittarius (Nov 22 - Dec 21) My horoscope for this past week was: Anti jaywalking law dictates you travel like a rook in chess - you can only go to the corner and go strait or left or right or back... Screw that, you need to make the world your chess board! BE the QUEEN! Go in any direction you want! Be the Queen that you know you want to be! Beef Jerky or something less gross - like beer or Egg Salad. I write these horoscopes or Horrorscopes as I call them because they are fun to write. I know the birthdays of my friends and other people I know through diaries and I often write them with specific people in mind - while keeping them general enough so that others would be inclined to follow their advice. I also include a meal suggestion, because frankly, most horoscope writers are totally neglecting meal advice, and that is a shame. Interviewed by GingerBug
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