The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

The poems in The Sleep of Reason were written in the poet's youth at the beginning of his experiments and poetic explorations. With sheer lyrical madness, poets such as Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, T S Eliot, Ezra Pound, WB Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Burgess, Thomas Merton, Eugenio Montale and Leonard Cohen haunt the poet's inner life in The Sleep of Reason They are often approximations of earlier works, translations or transliterations of dead poets. At other times, in daring homage or tribute, the poems interrogate each other, or interact and strive to get at their hidden truths. Some of the pieces, in different forms, have appeared in various magazines and collections. The entire work is a kind of "poet's notebook," with the whimsical play of "condemned poems," from which many new poems were derived, worked on, and developed over the years.