I May or May Not Love You

The poems in I May or May Not Love You reflect the author's belief that all of the history of poetry is there for the looting. You ll find Marianne Moore lurking in 'I Should Have No Doubts,' and Ezra Pound hanging out in 'Meditation in the Color of C;' Homer beached in 'Sentiment for a City,' and W.B. Yeats bar-hopping in 'Aging Out,' among others. And while he believes that all schools of poetry have something to teach, it's better to stay in class and go on assimilating rather than graduate.
It's the music of words that matter here: the 'banging of consonants' the 'rolling vowels,' and the assonance and alliteration and the 'contrapuntally chimed rhymes, off-key and off-kilter,' as they wander the terrain; Paris, Philadelphia, Denver; gazing at clocks and mirrors, listening to Tchaikovsky, playing the lottery, looking askance at Death, and cross-examining love.

David M. Perkins has spent his life inside books. He owned two bookstores in Denver, Colorado, and then moved to Philadelphia to go into publishing at Running Press and Westminster Press, then on to New York with Oxford University Press. From there to being Assistant Press Director at the University of Illinois Press and back to the East Coast as Associate Press Director at Georgetown University Press. He has had many hundreds of book reviews, some various articles, essays, and poetry published hither and yon; and he is owned by a blue-point Siamese cat named Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ('Mr. Petes').