The Flapper Press Poetry Café: The Poetry of Tom Squitieri

By Annie Newcomer:

The Flapper Press Poetry Café features the work of poets from around the world. This week, we highlight the work of Tom Squitieri.

Tom Squitieri is a three-time winner of the Overseas Press Club and White House Correspondents’ Association awards for work as a war correspondent. His poetry appears in several publications and venues. He writes most of his poetry while parallel parking or walking his dogs, Topsie and Batman.

www.redsnowltd.com

www.tsnavigations.com

@TomSquitieri

We reached out to Tom to talk about his career, influences, and his love of poetry.

Meet Tom Squitieri!

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AN: Tom, I experienced your poetry as romantic and full of hope, longing, and optimism. So I would like to ask you how you describe your poetry? What is your style that forms your signature pieces in this genre?

TS: I think you have captured most of it, except not so much longing. I stopped longing long ago and instead wonder and ponder and muse unbridled about the “what if” of love and being with that special person. I often feel I have been many times, in many ways; if you read more of my poems, you will see an expansion of this idea. I also try to think of what I would say to my younger self and to let him know it is okay to love in different ways, to embrace it and not weep over what does not happen. I feel lucky to feel these emotions and have experienced love—from war zones to college, to passions of the moment, to decades of love, to heartbreak and unrequited love, and—I say boldly—the love that only I can give. I want others to see that they are like me as well.

But oh yes, I decidedly am a romantic in all the ways possible and feel great when those who read my work feel they are being romanced.

My friend Lindon, who I just asked your question about if my poetry is romantic, said, “There should be more of a word for what it is (meaning beyond romantic).” I agree with her.

When people read my poems, they tell me they feel good, happy, excited, and innovative. Men see how they can be more romantic; some women say that I write just for them. Whispering poetry to one’s self or partner in bed as the day ends guarantees—at the minimum—sweet dreams and sunny mornings, regardless of the weather. The dreams are indeed poetic—joyous, a dancing string of mirth, romance, and creativity.

My styles are varied, but in the last year or so, the genre addresses how darkness sends uncertainty into many; in truth, it is our liberator and ally. It opens the mind and soul to the whole of the world, to all of our emotions, as we often are daring in the night when with others, yet fearful of what we say to ourselves when alone.

The flow of these poems and the body of my work goes through Today, Character, Spirits, Renewal, Intimacy, Embrace, Wounds, Challenge, and Tomorrow, evoking the blur of morning’s small hours when the cares of the day are eclipsed by the calls of the night—to be in the place and space for anyone so that they can easily and energetically find their way to you, and you can find your way to yourself.

To me, it is clear that poetry is the opera we all can enjoy if we are brave enough to sing. It is the Prosecco in the vineyard of words. When you write someone a poem, you can find the words that before could not come out of your mouth.

Tom Squitieri

AN: When I read your bio and saw that you are a war correspondent, I imagined that your poetry might address that subject matter, difficult as it is. But your selection didn’t. So I wondered if you ever write poetry about war? Or is poetry a release from that serious world for you?

TS: I rarely write about war directly. There was one early poem I wrote about how I was wounded, and there are references in later poems to Bosnia, Haiti, and other war zones—mostly as it strengthens “me” (I put me in quotes because I tell people my poems are never about me or one person, but things we all share or seek).

The three poems sent to you were the most recent that I wrote (I then finished another on March 23), and they do not mention war.

Here is something I find cool: when the war in Sarajevo was winding down in late 1995, I was walking down the hill from where I was staying to go into town; as always, I was looking around for details for a possible story. Roger Cohen of the NY Times was walking up the hill; he observed my glances, my pausing and jotting words. He smiled and said aloud in his British accent, “Ah Squitieri, writing poetry again.”

He was correct, and I had not realized it. My dispatches from the war zones were often written with a poetic song as the binding for the story.

I used the horrors of war, where love dared only to be shown in quiet, faraway places, to fuel the song shared by those who would not give up in the face of horror. Soon I realized that poetry is the window to not just capturing love but liberating love. The love most prevalent during the war was of those giving up everything to save someone they love. Nothing seemed more powerful. That is manifest now in writing the pleasure of love—not when love is a joy crushed under the boots of bully boys and rapists.

No, I do not write poetry as a release. Some of my poems are funny (like when friends and I overheard three women telling the fourth over drinks how to get her boyfriend more amorous by feeding him certain food). I started writing poetry a few Aprils ago (National Poetry Month) to keep my writing fresh, creative, energetic, and to say things I could not say as a reporter.

AN: I was impressed and also smiled when you shared that you write while parallel parking and/or walking your dogs. By the way, great names for your dogs—Batman and Topsie. Might you share more about your writing process? Do you enjoy “polishing your gems” through editing? Or do you find that for you writing is spontaneous and complete as is?

Who are some of your favorite poets and why? I think the work that we read influences our own poems.

TS: I've loved writing for decades, and now poetry reflects what I have learned, who I have saved, how I have fallen, and the wings that make me and others fly. I love poetry for many reasons, from listening to Dr. Gargano in freshman English reading "To His Coy Mistress" to Jackie Gleason reciting "Casey at the Bat." I think it started with “Twas The Night Before Christmas” and continued to “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.”

It is usually in the morning, as the coffee’s aroma is in a duet with the waking up songs of the birds, that I write. The more I write poems, the more places I find inspiration. Sometimes it is something I see that triggers a line, or that I hear or read, often a combination of seemingly disparate moments or thoughts or events or prods that weave themselves on my typing fingers. I carry paper and a pen and write down the line, word, or stanza. Then when I get home, I write what I have.

I usually write most of a poem in a rough draft and, yes, then I polish the gems. I edit a word, move things around, read aloud to the dogs for final approval. A few close friends will read different ones and help me see things I have overlooked or presumed. One friend, at the beginning of COVID, yearned for someone to be there with her, so the beautiful poem “I Will Be There” emerged. I was having dinner in a small French town a few summers ago and pretended I needed a cigarette, and three French girls offered me one (“French Girls Smoking Cigarettes”). One morning in the grocery store, I was able to hold a baguette fresh from the bakery, and it was still warm, and thus “Warm Bread at Morning” was born.

Poetry liberates me from the false rules many impose upon us; that is the potion to happiness, sensual invigoration, the bounty of a robust sex life, and embracing fun for couples. Poetry to start the day means you are alive. It is what truly sweetens that morning kiss.

So my styles are a mix, just like me (smile).

I am sorry, I do not have a favorite poet or poets; many are marvelous, and each time I read a poem, often blind, I think how privileged I am to be sometimes called a poet We are too often overlooked.

AN: What question have I not asked that you would like to answer?

TS: You got more out of me than anyone ever has.

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This poem captures how I take the battering of yearning for my love and the frustration of her hesitancy and recast it as a loving song to sway her to see the positive, the optimistic, the truth that our love—the gem—is a rare gift being given to us. It plays to the old saying of “she (or he) is out there somewhere”; I have believed that for many years.

The Gem

Can you run through the night with me,

And not be tired for my sunrise.

For that is where I am now.

That is where the bells chime

The truth comes clamoring,

Clanging, a churr,

Of your tentative

tintinnabulation

Run through the night with me

In my arms as I hold your slumber

In my words as I hold your heart

In my touch as I hold your soul

The truth is there, as a benign poltergeist

For this morning I was very close in our

Melliferous embrace

Open up for me

My lioness

Stop denying the

Gem we have at our fingertips

That awaits our polishing.

The words race to be written for you

When you take a deep pause, I will send

Then

we blush together and sigh in harmony

I have combined all those elements for you

so we are not leaving;

My dreams made you curious

Made the morning alive

And

For a fleeting moment

My eyes reveal my secrets

Not writing. Just doing

In the rumble of mystery

Comes a morning duet

Your gleeful sounds

with Northern Cardinals

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This poem is a pivot between the uncertainty night often brings to people and how I have transformed it into my Fortress of Creation and Embrace. The title is a phrase often said to me by friends who are coming to my home to share my amazing, excellent coffee—"Make it stronger," they say in advance. Since I write often best in the mornings as the coffee brews and then is enjoyed, I always make my coffee stronger and have taken that mantra to my contributions to the world.

Make It Stronger

The night says no to sleep

The mind does not complain

Thoughts are crisp

Sounds communicate with rare ease

Awakening and arousing anima

No need to move

New strength surprises

Embraced with no questions

The shortlist of what steps to

Take tomorrow

As they say to me

make it stronger

Balance joins now

To help with the unsteady days ahead

Quick whistles of the past add herbs to

This night’s tropism

Expresso suggests joining the other beans

It is a different night

A firmament for many tomorrows

Gleeful yapping outside

Of different animals

Inviting me to join

My true calling, they insist

For them I shall bring

My secret coffee

Together we will roam

And dance

As they help me

Search again

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The full moon was powerful this week, and this poem talks of how its power just captured me fully, liberated me, set my arousal to life and bounty and vivid intensity aflame. It is my animal cry to rouse others to join in the true spirit of being alive, again with that elusive partner with me, confident in how our twoness becomes a oneness that brings the radiance of a positive rainbow to the world.

Shades of Capture

you must turn your imagination on,

for I am soaring with smiles,

a fresh pot of coffee

a few moments of silent dance

The blue of beauty and boldness commands

For the moment

As the primary color

All I think of now is you, smiling with me,

laughing with me,

looking at my body with your rainbow eyes

nodding yes.

I pose for you now, knowing you will not see me.

How can I not give myself to you

after dreaming of you all night

then waking to rush to hold you?

The yellows of a reluctant dawn

Eagerly yearn to take over as

the primary color

Lighting me for your eyes

As it nods to me,

Knowing you are not here

And should be

What does it see

That you are not seeing?

Or that anyone can see?

So very much.

Visible are the stark black edges of

where the shadow pushes me out to you,

to all

Now, however, it is the capture by the full moon power.

Shadow tones are the primary colors

Secrets of hazel and purple, tone and beauty and power

the colors sketch us finally together

in emotions we have long-held

Perhaps you will run your fingers softly,

steadily over every inch of me

until it is my pleasure that envelops you so deeply.

With now, the pale red of my heartbeat the metronome of all parts

The pink of my tongue in my wail,

asking where is she

As if a fox calls in it moon power

As these primary colors rise

I hope my lover is well and happy,

that she misses me and wants me,

Her name written in the circumfluent shadows

Where I can embrace her

And sing the barcarolle I wrote for her

I am up early now,

pulled from bed by the demand of the moonbeams,

to stand facing and drinking that power

to feel those moonbeams consume and stir and restore,

as no one else does or will,

to write of my poetic world of love and desire and truth and beauty despite all.

I just stood in the moonbeams and let them touch me and ignite me.

They never ignore but implore, explore, say more.

I wait impatiently, eagerly, for my true partner.

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Art work by Heidi Miller Lowell; daughter Gabriella by Tom Squitieri

This poem is a rarity—one that I wrote as a request from a close friend. She wanted a poem for her husband, and when we discussed ideas, she said how they liked to camp. From that, I grew the poem, infusing it with my love of nature and night, the penetrating memories of my being in the woods in the mountains of Pennsylvania as a young boy and my romance with the power, beauty, and magic of the lunation and its firefly agents that always led me to discovery and secret epiphanies. If you have ever felt the crisp, brisk splash of yikes when entering a mountain stream or lake, that jolt that awakens the body, and then feeling the balance of the gentle melding with the nature surrounding the pond . . . well, then, you are on the path of which I write. We sleep heavenly in our tent, having been embraced by this.

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The Fireflies Path to the Pond

Wander down the path

With me

To the pond

To shed and swim

Let’s watch the stars

Bounce off the water

Play tag with

Each other

As they laugh and splash a comet

And flounce in the moon’s smile

Watered out

We walk as we are

and find the path

Led by fireflies back to

our tent,

Serenaded by the cool dirt

That chortles through our toes

Over the hill is a camper

With a lantern

And mosquito net

Not realizing

it is here, where we are,

That crickets mean

the song of nature

and

not a silence

The morning will crack its cold smile

It hardly seems sincere no matter

How hard it tries

Since it never can squelch that inner glow

Of the heat that passion provides

Of the fire and trust we share

that defines being alive

As always, there are embers,

to help stoke our fire

Night darkens

And invites

Tonight the tent will review

Our explorations

Tomorrow we will find,

That apple tree

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Annie Newcomer teaches poetry classes at the University of Kansas Medical Center's Turning Point—a place for hope and healing for people suffering with chronic health problems. Her North Stars series shares interviews with poets and writers and Annie's own experiences through writing.

Annie is also helms the Flapper Press Poetry Café—dedicated to celebrating poets from around the world and to encouraging everyone to write poetry!

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