Unlike giants of 20th Century Modernism such as Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, businessmen who kept their day jobs at a seeming distance from their poetry, Ed Rosenthal “Poet/Broker of Downtown Los Angeles was known for successfully integrating his writing and real estate. Poet Broker presented real estate issues in classical verse as his concerns ran from social justice issues to the practicality of closing deals. The Wall Street Journal published a series of his rhyming couplets in which he admonished short sited developers. LA Times cited his “Poetic Request for an Extension of Escrow” as an important contributor to DTLA redevelopment. Ed was the only poet to be published in the prestigious Urban Land Magazine where he penned two poems raising the concerns of minority contractors and the needs for affordable housing. His performance poetry at public events reached a peak in his peon to Lula Washington Dance Theatre, delivered to three thousand listeners at the Orpheum Theater in DTLA in 2002. The survival of a harrowing near-death experience in the Mojave Desert in 2010 abruptly altered his focus away from economics toward the spiritual realm. The change is beautifully memorialized in his poetry manuscript “The Desert Hat” Published by Moonrise Press his series of nature poems for the Sierra Club and pieces in local anthologies Altadena Poetry Review and Beyond the Lyric Moment.