Doug Holder: Who, in your opinion, are the great insulters of the literati, be it authors or their characters? I can think of Dorothy Parker offhand…probably a lot of the guys and gals at the Roundtable for instance….

A.C. Kemp: Most definitely Dorothy Parker! People get excited about Shakespearian insults, but they make you sound more pretentious than funny. In Hamlet, you've got lines like "it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters" about bad actors. Parker's critique of Katherine Hepburn–"She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B"–has more punch. Plus, Parker shared many of Lady Snark's favorite hobbies, like drinking and sleeping with married men.

DH: Miss Snark, seen on the front cover of your book, your alter ego, seems like the perfect purveyor of your perspective. I wonder — is "snark" a slang word? Is she a sort of a cold roast Brahmin, who is having a bad hair day?

Kemp: Definitely not a Brahmin. Lady Snark was born in Gackle, North Dakota. She ran away from home as a teenager, worked as an exotic dancer, then moved to Paris to start the long, slow process of marrying up. As for snark, it's not slang. It seems like a newish word, but it's well over a hundred years old and was even used before Lewis Carroll's "Hunting of the Snark" poem. It comes from the even better word snork, meaning to grunt or snort. I think we should reintroduce that one, because I'd love to say, "stop being so snorky!"

DH: How is the quality of insults in Somerville?

Kemp: Average, but of course, I'm limited to the sample of people who have insulted me. There may be very creative insulters outside my circle of enemies.

DH: Do you think McCain and Obama are good at this art of mudslinging?

Kemp: Not really. "Palling around with terrorists" is pretty lame. I was kind of hoping for some snaps in the debates, like "Your mama is so dumb she flunked out of the Electoral College"-that sort of thing.

DH: You are a scholar of slang and you founded the website slangcity.com. This developed from a course you taught ESL students. Do you think when we are taught foreign languages in school, slang should be an important component as well? I remember only being taught in language labs stuff like: "In the evening we dress in our colorful native costumes and dance and sing with other idealistic youth." Real people don't talk that away…

Kemp: I definitely think language students need more slang if they plan to spend any time in a country where the language is spoken. That's why I started teaching the slang class. If you don't know slang or even idioms, it's very hard to fit in, and you can get yourself in trouble by not understanding that you're being propositioned, threatened or invited to do something illegal. I had a straight student once who didn't realize, because of language and culture differences, that he was being hit on by a guy until he was at the guy's house.

DH: You teach at MIT. Across the hall is Junot Diaz. He is our featured reader in The Somerville News Writers Festival that you are a part of. What slang verbiage might you use to congratulate him on his Pulitzer?

Kemp: Actually, Junot is upstairs from me, but I'd just say "Congratulations!" I'm much more creative at being mean than nice.

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being." — William Wordsworth

In the Walking

It will happen like this for many of you,

the house suddenly too much, the garden so full

you go out, maybe thinking of the way the earth gives

under your feet, the water makes circles around them

if you have to cross a river, leaves and branches lift

up and then brush against you when you have

crossed, these things or the very structure of things,

the making of the hip joint, electrical plots in the

heart, thalamus sending reminders to the moving,

you looking up into the still wings of gliding crows

on this day when you know in one second there

is the power to give things new names, so you decide

this is not leaving but returning, that ends are

middles or that there are no points, no time,

so by the time you are miles away from leaving

it is only the eternal very first moment of anything,

making a pound cake from scratch, moving your

hand across the hem of a new skirt, the slight fear

and tremble when a sudden sound hits your wall, like

children throwing the ball against the fire escape

until it rattles like an empty skeleton, the hot shower

where you are alone until the memories step

in with you, deep solitude of living alone, falling

to where you are connected with everything, and

it happens, the stepping out, mind full of seeing

yourself move out into the world without difference

so you can see every move you make is a change

in the current, the arrangement of patterns under a brush,

a twisted calligrapher's stroke, all these things, walking

while the bones of who you are become roots.

Afaa Michael Weaver

previously published in American Poetry Review

*Afaa Michael Weaver is the author of "Plum Flower Dance" ( UPITT/PRESS)