Prime Time for Poet Pinsky

Imagine my shock last night when Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report brought out poet Robert Pinsky (he of the honeyed and vaguely lascivious voice) to host a "Meta-Free-Phor-All" with Sean Penn. And further shock when he proved to do pretty well. Bob Barker, look out:

Sure, the show was mostly about Penn's politics and one particularly colorful (if not nuanced) metaphor he employed vis-a-vis our misguided President. Still, I can't remember the last time a living poet appeared on national television outside of the token features that the news networks tend to run in national poetry month (which we're in the middle of, and which for most people is really national file your effing taxes month), much less one as popular as Colbert's. Three cheers for Colbert for bringing Pinsky on, and three cheers for Pinsky for showing poets are (A) actually still around and (B) not incapable of humor.