San Francisco Poet Diane Frank Featured June 16 At Third Thursday Poetry and Jazz at Arena Market
By Blake More
On Thursday, June 16, the Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz Reading Series will feature San Francisco poet Diane Frank. The reading will take place at the Arena Market cafe and will begin at 7:30pm with live improv jazz, followed by a featured reading with Diane Frank, then an open mic with jazz improv, and finally the reading will conclude with more live improv jazz.
Diane Frank, a nationally respected poet and cellist in the Golden Gate Symphony, is our feature on June 16 for Blake More’s Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz Series. She will read poems that explore music from the inside and other topics. She is author of eight books of poems, three novels, and a photo memoir of her 400 mile trek in the Nepal Himalayas, Letters from a Sacred Mountain Place: A Journey through the Nepal Himalayas.
During the pandemic, she used the quiet time as a writing retreat. This led to the publication of three books in 2021, including While Listening to the Enigma Variations, her New and Selected Poems, by Glass Lyre Press. She also edited two bestselling anthologies – Fog and Light: San Francisco through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here, and with Prartho Sereno as co-editor, Pandemic Puzzle Poems. It began with a series of poems about poets doing jigsaw puzzles during the early days of the shut down but expanded to poems calling for social justice, poems grieving the California fires, poems exploring our lives during the pandemic, and poems of joy and inspiration, which often arrived in quiet and subtle ways.
Diane Frank is also author of three novels. "Blackberries in the Dream House", her first novel, won the Chelson Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It’s the forbidden love story of a geisha and a Buddhist monk. Her second novel, Yoga of the Impossible is a metaphysical love story with a tribe of late-blooming artists looking for love on a crooked path. The narrator, a gypsy sculptor, sees the world through the lens of the Yoga of the Impossible – a path of getting enlightened by exploring opposites and contradictions. Her novel is populated by artists, dancers, sculptors, musicians, mermaids, radio talk show hosts, and betta fish – all of them on a quest to make every moment holy. Her third novel, forthcoming in the fall, is full of music and musicians. It begins on Signal Mountain, TN and migrates to the Northern California Coast.
Diane teaches at San Francisco State University and Dominican University in San Rafael. She is also Chief Editor of Blue Light Press. She lives in San Francisco, where she dances, plays cello, and creates her life as an art form. Her friends describe her as a harem of seven women in one very small body. Read more about her books at DianeFrank.net.
Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz is supported by The Third Thursday Poetry Group, many anonymous donors, and Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from The James Irvine Foundation.
