Now of course, everybody knows him as the architect of George Bush’s divisive political machine and more recently as a divisive Fox News commentator. He seems the antithesis of everything the EV program values. In his recent memoir Courage and Consequence, Rove recalled that he applied to EV with the express intent of undermining what he saw as the program’s ethos of liberal multiculturalism. Looking back on it, we should have been more skeptical about his application and the accompanying one-act play about albinism and, as he referred to it, the albino-American community. In hindsight of course the play clearly suffered from a lack of authenticity. And sadly, PEN’s relations with the actual albino-American community have yet to be fully repaired.

But at the time and on paper we accepted Rove in good faith. And felt lucky to find a willing and available mentor with whom to pair him, the wonderful poet Nikki Giovanni.

After meeting with him, however, Ms. Giovanni was onto his fraud immediately. PEN wanted to kick him out. Especially Jamie Wolf, who’d just returned from vacation and was horrified to learn how badly we’d screwed up in her two weeks away. She’d brought to that board meeting souvenirs from her trip, including a pair of antique dueling pistols she’d purchased in Sicily. I don’t know if you remember that one particularly awkward moment, Jamie, but I really believed you were going to shoot me in the face.

Ms. Giovanni, however, took all of this in stride and said, “Let’s just see what happens.”

She and Rove started meeting, every other week or so. He never turned in any work beyond that initial one-act play, and it was starting to seem like he hadn’t even written that. He would just harangue her about whatever political hair was across his ass at any given moment, and Ms. Giovanni would calmly turn the conversation back to writing, particularly as an expression of moral responsibility. Frankly, it didn’t look like there was much headway being made. Until one very strange night. Rove showed up at her apartment, late, in the pouring rain, and with a wild look in his eye. He clutched a sheaf of poems, but he wouldn’t let her look at them, he would only read them aloud.

She later told me, “It’s as though what he’d written threatened his very identity.” These poems made such an impression on her, she was able to recall them years later. Focused on some of the very themes Rove would become infamous for politically, they show a young man wavering at a moral crossroads. A prime example is his poem titled “Gay Marriage Initiative,” which goes like this:

Why can’t it be Adam and Eve or Adam and Steve?
Or Eve and, well, some girl that rhymes with Eve?
All I know is I’m having dinner alone.
Won’t somebody love me?
Anybody?
Please?

In his poem, “Immigration Reform,” he coined these distinctly un-Rovian lines:

He who soweth hysteria about borders
risketh waiting on the wrong side of the Pearly Gates.
¡Hola! Mi casa es su casa.
Can I offer you an Arnold Palmer?

Perhaps his most surprising poem, given the eventual role he allegedly played in derailing John McCain's 2000 presidential primary bid, comes from a place so raw, so tender that, according to Ms. Giovanni, tears streamed down young Rove’s face as he read it. That poem is titled "John McCain Has a Black Baby."

There’s a rumor,
who knows how it got started,
John McCain has a black baby.
I for one, fail to see
how this is any of my business.
I mean, seriously, how is this any of my god damn business?
But if it’s true, I am happy for them both, man and baby alike.
I am a friend to all person-kind
and to all the colors of the rainbow.

Immediately after that bizarre evening, Rove fled back to Texas. On more than one occasion since, Ms. Giovanni has lamented, “If only we’d gotten to him a little sooner, we might have changed the fate of the free world.” I myself have spent many sleepless nights wondering the same thing. But I take a measure of comfort in this: If the EV program in its pre-emergent infancy could inspire even glimmers of enlightenment from a tough case like Karl Rove, imagine the kind of work the real program, now in its fourteenth glorious year, can inspire in writers who have fully formed human souls.