Meet Rowan Williams the poet.

Meet Satan’s mistress, the best poet in the U.S.

I have to say this about Sharon Olds. She was the first contemporary influence upon me. While taking my first poetry workshop as an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Dallas one of our required readings was Satan Says, her first book. The year was 1989. I immediately found a poetic soul mate.

Like Olds, I grew up in a religious hellfire and brimstone environment with some serious familial dysfunctions. Unlike her (as she states in the interview), I was a good student; I’ve always excelled academically. But I took out Satan Says and read it before we actually had to in the class. On the title alone I started reading and was struck by the imagery and straightforward verses. I wrote my first poem for the workshop and was rejected by half the class. Sheryl St. Germain, the instructor of the class, said she had received numerous phone calls from other students, some of whom wanted to drop out of the class. I felt powerful. I felt wicked. I felt alive. I was in control and loved it.

I never made a vow to Satan as Sharon Olds says she did. Years later, I had a Damascus Road experience and converted to Christianity, almost against my will. I remember C.S. Lewis said it happened to him that way too. I burned all my poems, including the one that I had written on that day. It’s probably the best poem I’ve ever written; it was certainly the most honest and most passionate. It just spewed forth like volcanic lava. But as I try to write, even today, very often I find myself slipping back into that mode, that natural kick-everyone-I-see-in-the-nuts kind of writing and it feels good. I don’t know why that style appeals to me. I think it’s the brimstone looking for the fire. And it’s the same kind of poetry I find when I read Sharon Olds. Somewhere, Baudelaire is smiling his face off.