Poetry’s Sleep at Noontime is a thirteen-part poetic odyssey that weaves a rich tapestry of philosophical inquiry, cultural critique, and lyrical meditation, exploring the decline of poetry into prose and the soul’s struggle against a modern world steeped in materialism and spiritual decay. Spanning centuries and voices—from Molière’s 17th-century bourgeois satire to the 20th-century existential quests of Ferlinghetti and Pirsig—this work interrogates the loss of music, love, and radiance in art, tracing a descent from the Socratic ideal of winged poesy to a contemporary landscape shadowed by death-driven duende and hollow masquerades.
The poem opens with “Phaedrus, Where Have You Been?” invoking Plato’s Phaedrus as a beacon of poetic vitality, juxtaposed against Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, a prosaic everyman whose unmusical soul epitomizes the bourgeois ascent over genuine art. Through sections like “The River of Death” and “The Grand Mamamouche,” the narrative unfurls a descent into a Jordan-like abyss—symbolizing both literal and metaphorical death—where language becomes a tool of power rather than beauty, culminating in the absurd rites of a mock nobility. The middle movements, such as “The Golden Door” and “The Tongue of Sabir,” delve into the alchemical transmutation of love into capital and the rise of a pidgin speech that drowns out the soul’s song, drawing on historical and mythical threads from Jacob’s ladder to Masonic ritual.
The latter sections pivot to a modern critique: “Duende’s Dark Song” and “The Wolf’s Masquerade” confront Ferlinghetti’s call for a dark, earthy spirit and Pirsig’s misreading of Phaedrus as a wolf, revealing a tension between light and shadow, truth and deception. The poem crescendos in “The Winged Soul” and “The Cult of Duende,” where the radiant Phaedrus—symbol of the soul’s ascent—battles the Dionysian duende, a death cult that Lorca and Ferlinghetti exalt but which the poet reframes as anti-poetry, a negation of the Muse. The finale ties Rimbaud’s luminous Voyelles and Blake’s joyful The Fly to a Socratic vision, reclaiming poetry as light and music against the prose of a fallen age.
Rich with intertextual echoes—Plato, Molière, Pirsig, Lorca, Ferlinghetti, Rimbaud, Blake—this work is both a lament and a defiance, a philosophical elegy that probes the soul’s fate in a world where poetry sleeps at noontime, yet whispers of its awakening through love’s enduring wings. Structured in thirteen titled sections, each prefaced by mottos from classical and modern sources, it blends dense allusion, etymological play, and lyrical rhythm into a profound meditation on art, identity, and redemption.
