John Rosenthal

Teaching, And The Mood Of Relativity

Many years ago when I first taught college English, I made a discovery in the first or second week of teaching, namely, that the main obstacle to instruction, to one’s ability to teach someone something they don’t already know, is the mood and spirit of relativity.

To Mary

Wood Sculptures

My work is a universe complete with its own set of rules and regulations. My job is simply to follow the rules, which are unknowable, made of shadows, and are always changing.

Wood Sculptures

There is a border between intention (the conscious effect of each curve or bend) and the more powerful energy that is just beyond direct reach of consciousness.

Insisting On Love

Oh you modest-living professional little bastards, giving in to all that mortgaged decency, all those inner rules of silence, as if the spirit of youth was an aberration to be got over and not the event itself, the event of your life, the adventure you ended up betraying for a house in Twit Acres and 2.3 kids you won’t ever understand.

Selected Poems

Photographs By John Rosenthal

The photographs in this selection are available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

Love’s Fool

One Hundred Years Of Solitude — An Appreciation

We forget, until a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude reminds us, that a metaphor can be a glimpse into the interconnectedness of things, and as such, a large new breath of possibility to our pallid imaginings of self.

Mailer And Me

This is what comes to mind when I think of Norman Mailer: that boredom is a logjam in a river which needs to flow; that a good heavyweight faces death every time he steps into the ring and that Hemingway may have faced it every day; television can give you cancer, along with rancor and fear and too much courtesy. . . .