  In this paper we study the isomonodromic deformations of systems of
differential equations with poles of any order on the Riemann sphere as
Hamiltonian flows on the product of co-adjoint orbits of the Takiff algebra
(i.e. truncated current algebra). Our motivation is to produce confluent
versions of the celebrated Knizhnik--Zamolodchikov equations and explain how
their quasiclassical solution can be expressed via the isomonodromic
$\tau$-function. In order to achieve this, we study the confluence cascade of
$r+ 1$ simple poles to give rise to a singularity of arbitrary Poincar\'e rank
$r$ as a Poisson morphism and explicitly compute the isomonodromic
Hamiltonians.
