“Standard ‘Metaphor-Off’ rules apply. Are your metaphorical buzzers ready?”

There’s an interview with former poet laureate and Meta-Free-Phor-All moderator Robert Pinsky in Mother Jones today. Check out his thoughts on The Colbert Report (from Mother Jones):

Spreading the Word
Interview: Robert Pinsky talks about his mission to popularize poetry, Emily Dickinson versus hip-hop, and the enduring influence of The Colbert Report.

Interviewed By Kiera Butler
October 16, 2007

Robert Pinsky has spent the better part of his career trying to convince Americans that poetry is for everyone. While he was serving as the United States poet laureate from 1997 to 2000, he traveled around the country with a camera crew, filming people reading their favorite poems. The result was the Favorite Poem Project, an online video database where you can watch a salesman in Barneveld, New York, read John Ashbery or a U.S. Marine officer in Miami recite Walt Whitman.

But spreading the gospel of poetry is only part of what Pinsky does these days—he’s also Slate’s poetry editor, is working on an opera libretto, and still makes time for the occasional guest appearance on The Simpsons and The Colbert Report (which happen to be two of his favorite shows) . . .

* * *

MJ: You recently went on The Colbert Report to judge a “Meta-Free-Phor-All” between Stephen Colbert and Sean Penn.

RP: These are two very skilled performers, and intuitively they had a very good notion of the importance of poetry. I like both of those guys very much. I confess that I find a lot of the stuff that goes into titles like poet laureate to be highly spurious and silly. But I’ll always be grateful for the laureate title because I think it probably helped people decide to invite me to be on The Simpsons and The Colbert Report. I love comedy, and I think we’re in a great period of comedy, maybe our greatest period of comedy in American history—certainly American television.

MJ: Does that mean that The Simpsons and The Colbert Report are going to endure?

RP: I think so. I think the best episodes of those shows will endure, partly because they have a kind of moral seriousness. We’re in a grown-up period of comedy. The old Saturday Night Live might have been a step in the right direction, and they did some terrific things, but it was not as informed or as bold. The performers were great, but the writing is more ferocious and more informed and smarter today. [Comedian] Sid Caesar was one of the artists I first realized was a really great artist. I didn’t grow up in a family that was literary, but we were smart, and we knew Sid Caesar was very good. Eventually Sid Caesar was competing with Lawrence Welk, and Welk was more popular, but I deeply think my family was right. This present time is the only time that’s worthy of being compared to the old Sid Caesar shows.

Read the full interview here

Thanks for the great interview, Mr. Pinsky! I, for one, don’t read nearly enough poetry, but I certainly enjoy it when I do make the time. And it’s great to hear Stephen slip bits of poetry into The Colbert Report every now and again; I recognized the quotes from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (which Stephen also quoted in his interview with Dhani Jones) and “Ozymandias” in The Meta-Free-Phor-All, at least.

Since that brilliant showdown between Stephen and Sean Penn deserves multiple viewings, here’s your chance for another peek at it: