For 25 years Ken Warren lived a double life. He was a respected and sure-handed suburban head librarian by day. But at night, off the public clock, he was a dark poet and a "punk, fugitive mongrel critic." He cranked out reams of writing, musing on poetry, art, life, death, the soul of man, the profound and the profane.

Those epic adventures in priapic prose and poetic madness are now collected into one Visigothic volume entitled "Captain Poetry's Sucker Punch: A Guide to the Homeric Punkhole, 1980-2012," $25 (BlazeVox).

This whirlwind of a compendium, weighing in at 469 single-spaced pages is both a challenge and a delight. Warren is a blazing intellect whose "high" IQ is matched only by his boundless intellectual curiosity.

These essays bounce around the cultural universe like sparking meteors, including musings and analysis on the poetry of Charles Olson, Simone Weil, d.a. levy, Jack Kerouac, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, Ed Sanders, Gregory Corso, Ed Dorn and Cleveland's late poet laureate Daniel Thompson.

Musically, Warren examines the meaning of Pere Ubu, Bo Didley, Devo, the Floyd Band, John Cage, and Johnny Thunders. This is a heady stew. A hang-on-to-your-hat journey to the center of Warren's hallucinogenic intellect through the dark recesses of his visionary soul.

He writes of semiotics, poetics and the psychogeography of Northeast Ohio from the burning of the Cuyahoga River to the killings at Kent State. And he binds them together brilliantly.

There are also healthy doses of sulfuric humor and generous dollops of academic mumbo jumbo. This is not a book you read. It's one with which you take up residence for an unforeseen period of time. It's like a relationship with someone so much smarter and stranger than yourself you need to measure and weigh the pace and lengths of your visits.

It's been three years since Warren left his post at Lakewood Public Library. He now lives near Lake Ontario, 15 miles east of Niagara Falls. He's proud of his tenure at the library. He oversaw the $16 million dollar remake. But there's something else of which he's even more proud.

"The development of the collection," he said over the phone recently. "That's what makes it a temple of knowledge. It's heaven sitting on top of Lakewood."

But about that book? (Full disclosure: I was name-checked in a reference to the late Lakewood poet and artist Christopher Steele.)

"The Homeric punkhole is the journey through the psychogeography of Cleveland. From d.a. levy's writing about the city as a dark necropolis to Jim Lowell writing about the death throes of the divine child. It was my journey to the underworld."

Warren acknowledges the dichotomy of his life in Lakewood.

"I was called to public life at the library. I think the last thing people would want to know about the head of their library is that he was a poet. But it's what kept me close to the smoke signals of my soul."

House Organ was the name of Warren's poetry newsletter. It got the attention of writer and poet Andrei Codrescu, who is a regular contributor to NPR's "All Things Considered" and the subject of an essay in Warren's collection.

"I started reading Ken's essay on Olson, and then my admiration for the critic and his journal kept growing from issue to issue," said Codrescu, whose new book is "Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes)."

"I was amazed at the clarity, depth, and breath-stopping (quite often and literally) quality of his insights. I never knew wherefrom he sprang, though I was curious and somewhat baffled that such a world-class publication came out of Ohio. So there was the double delight of reading a first-rate magazine edited by a first-rate critic who was not in New York. That was a few years ago, and now that I've read the whole of Ken Warren's collected essays in this book, I can tell you for certain: There is no one writing on poetry this well and with such a sharp focus anywhere in America."

Warren was a college student under Charles Olson at the University at Buffalo and he also studied under Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley. But he also has great admiration for the poets and professors who came out of Kent State in the early and late 1970s. Poets such as Robert Duncan and Ed Dorn.

"Members of Devo have said that Ed Dorn was an early supporter of their work and a crucial influence on the band," said Warren. "I also did a lot of music writing for Alternative Press while I was at the library. I used the nom de plume Bagworm."

The literary life Warren led on the side wasn't a secret to everyone in Lakewood. His pal Jim O'Bryan -- writer, artist and publisher of the Lakewood Observer -- still cherishes their friendship.

"When I met Ken Warren, he was a true living relic of the Beat Poetry movement, holding down the position of Lakewood Public Library director," said O'Bryan. "What I found is that Ken's depth of knowledge of man and mankind was staggering. He believed in classical libraries. Meaning that a library must be the center of a community-- a true intellectual and cultural center, a safe place of learning and exchanging ideas and thoughts. This made him one of the most powerful people in Lakewood, and possibly the sharpest human I have had the pleasure to work with. Just a cool, beautiful dude."

Warren will be back in town on Saturday, Nov. 3, to read from his book at Mac's Backs Books on Coventry. Codrescu said he wished he could be there.

"He's a poet himself, endowed with that extra organ, a lucid, critical sense of what is there and what needs to be done," said Codrescu. "I'd go anyplace with him though I'm sure there will be great trouble wherever that is."