"I write about what it feels like to get blood on your hands," says Tom Smario.

PROFILE
The Sweet SCIENCE
Poet and fight cornerman Tom Smario unearths beauty in boxing's bloody heart.

by ZACH DUNDAS
zdundas@wweek.com

Sitting in the amber light of the Virginia Cafe, Tom Smario wears an old ballcap, embroidered with the words "RING RAGE." Surrounded by people hard at work on a Sunday afternoon beer buzz, Smario clutches a coffee cup with fingers that seem too short and thick for the precision tasks required of them--sealing bleeding flesh, binding shattered bones, writing poetry.

For money, Smario labors as an orthopedic technician at Kaiser, setting casts on broken limbs. For love, he works as a cutman during pro boxing matches, patching up fighters between rounds. Then there's the poetry, which he says comes out of necessity. "Boxers are a lot like poets," Smario says. "Poets don't write because they want to, they write because they have to. Same with fighters. It's an obsession. That's why they fight too long and don't know when to quit."

Smario's twin trades and single fixation come together in Notes of a Cornerman, a slim book of boxing poems recently published by local indie press Peninhand. Smario's sixth book of verse (but first in 15 years), Notes reflects an insider's feel for detail and an accuracy only someone with icy nerves could salvage from adrenalized split seconds. "Working a corner is the most intense thing you can do," Smario says. "When you're doing it, there's nothing else. I never even know what round it is. When you work in a hospital, you learn to separate yourself from people's pain. When a boxer comes back to the corner with blood streaming down his face, I don't feel his pain. I couldn't do my job if I did. When you write, though, obviously you're not detached. Maybe I shut it off when it happens and go back and feel it later."

If that's the method, it works. Smario reels off jabbing lines that pour into each other. His line breaks fall in odd, jagged rhythms, but the effect feels unforced, leaving his verses capable of sudden bursts of speed. He's not afraid to tackle boxing's racial dramas and arbitrary cruelties, or to go after those who oppose the sport.

Informed by Smario's firsthand knowledge of the so-called "sweet science," most lines in Notes come bathed in a fresh coat of gore and sweat. "I write about what it feels like to get blood on your hands," Smario acknowledges.

Still, the poet finds an explosive glory in the mayhem. In the mini-epic title piece, Smario describes a champion's attack: "His jab became like the tongue/ of a serpent that licked the eyelids/ of Miguel and infected them with South/ American poison...."

A priceless gallery of rogues and heroes (and rogue/heroes) populates Notes: wise-talking promoters, Mexican kids crossing the border in car trunks in hopes of a shot at glory, wicked-fisted champions, hapless also-rans, Don King. Notes works as a bracing reportorial plunge into an alternate reality.

A fight fan since his California childhood in the '50s and '60s, Smario caught the poetry virus after reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind when he was 18. Portland's vibrant poetry scene helped draw him here in the '70s, and through the '80s he actively read and published his verse. Then came his long absence from the public eye, which he attributes in part to his growing involvement with boxing.

Though he'd dabbled in writing about the sport, his head-first plunge didn't come until the early '90s, when an encounter at a book signing--of all things--led to his first gig in a fighter's corner. "When Katherine Dunn came out with Geek Love, I went to a reading and book signing she did, and met Mike Morton there," Smario recounts. "Mike is the premier boxing manager in the Northwest, has been for probably 40 years. And I talked to Mike about my hospital background and I said, you know, 'I think I'd make a good cutman, you should try me out.' And it just kind of took off from that point."

Smario has since worked more than 100 fights; in addition to ministering to lacerations, he trains fighters at the Grand Avenue Gym. Between the boxing work and the hospital job, he finds time to write at night and on weekends.

A rough schedule, no doubt. However, Smario's verse couldn't live without its black-and-blue realism. Talking to the poet, one gets a clear sense of how vital he considers the work that, paradoxically, cramps his writing schedule.

"I taught poetry at Marylhurst a few years ago," Smario says. "And the first thing I told the kids was, if you really want to be a poet, you should get a job. Just get a job. Because you can't make a living as a poet, and if you try you'll go crazy and quit."