Mohawk / Samoa Transmigrations, just out from Subpress, is a slender project for a perfect-bound book, containing really just eight short poems apiece by James Thomas Stevens & Caroline Sinavaiana, but it also is quite a bit more than that. What that is lies all in the setting. Stevens is an Akwesasne Mohawk poet, teaching now at SUNY Fredonia. Sinavaiana is a Samoan-born poet, teaching now at the University of Hawai’i, spending half of each year on O’ahu, but the remainder of it in Dharamsala, India, where I believe she is involved in the large Tibetan Buddhist community in exile there.

Both are poets one might easily associate with the post-avant – Stevens, who carries the Mohawk name Aronhiotas, has an MFA from Brown & studied at Naropa, Sinavaiana has published before with Subpress, the small press collective whose 19 editors commit themselves to putting one percent of their annual income into a series of book projects, and which grew originally out of the efforts of some SUNY-Buffalo grads. But what I don’t sense here is much interest on the part of either writer with how she or he fits into any western frame or literary traditions. If anything, both have more in common with the great poet of the Sioux nation, Simon Ortiz, himself a one-time student of Charles Olson who has gone on to situate his poetics fully into his community in the American Southwest.

But what this book isn’t, and what makes it so interesting, is a simple celebration of community as such, so much as a recognition that these very different communities share more than a few things in common. The book is divided into two sections, with some front- and back-matter as well. The first, “From the Mohawk,” consists of four poems by Stevens with four “answering” poems by Sinavaiana. The second, “From the Samoan,” reverses the process. In each section, surrounding each set of poems is a traditional verse of some sort, both transliterated and translated into English. Stevens’ topics, to think of them like that, include songs concerning canoes, mosquitoes, cornbread, and thunderers. Sinavaiana’s include rats, funerals, pigeons and sarongs. Facing each right-hand page of text is a drawing by Stevens, who is really superb at this, “illustrating” the page. Thus, for example, we find roughly the same mosquito opposite both his and Sinavaiana’s poems, save for some patterning on whatever it is – an arm? – that the mosquito rests on. For his own poem, the pattern (which shows up in multiple places in this book, including on its cover) is of an Iroquois celestial dome design. For Sinavaiana’s, it’s a Samoan tattoo pattern appears to be a variation on Pandanus blossoms, that being the plant used in so many Samoan mat-plaited woven products.

The text for the opening sequence will give you a better idea of what’s going on. The section is titled “Kahonwe:ia Kare’na / Canoe Song,” the translation of which reads:

The canoe is very fast. It is mine.
All day I hit the water.
I paddle along. I paddle along.

Opposite an illustration of a canoe (kahonwe:ia) is Stevens’ poem:

I am the hull – rapid against your stream.
Birch beneath the ribs
        circumnavigating your body.

Endless propeller of my arm
        as it circles to find the flow.

I move this way against you.
I move this way.

Opposite a second illustration – it’s not clear if this is a Samoan craft or not – labeled “Va’aalo” – is Sinavaiana’s text:

Fly canoe to blue reefs
Sing to bonito
swimming in green
shadow.

Let your chant angle
through the deep water.
A hook for the ear
of fish, a line
of cadence to mark
the time.

From your hull
I will strike the beast.
I will mark it.

The approaches taken by the two poets is quite different, with Stevens using the occasion to create a metaphor for intimacy, Sinavaiana the more Objectivist in her fishing song – I really love the idea of singing to the tuna as one goes out to meet them. Both poems end focused on the speaker, Stevens in the present tense, Sinavaiana in the future.

This is pretty much the range of this book, which is at once its strength & its limit. The poems are not overly ambitious, but all are well crafted & one has the sense of being present almost at a gift exchange between the two poets. The poems themselves are only implicitly collaborative, as each responds to the other, but always framed within their own hand – it’s a model that reminded me, actually, of the way Leslie Scalapino & Lyn Hejinian mark their sections of the book Sight with their initials (which I know has set some readers on edge, tho I found I liked it, that it seemed completely appropriate to the project at hand).

Mohawk / Samoa Transmigrations is a hopeful token of globalization as it can be, positively, experienced by individuals. As such, it’s a far cry from the term as it shows up these days in the Wall Street Journal, but ultimately it’s much closer to the dream that Marx himself voiced some 150 years ago, of people – he would have said workers – from radically different communities and histories offering a literary equivalent to mutual aid.

There are other layers here that one might contemplate – the connection of Samoan experience to Native American culture, literally that of any native peoples engulfed in the historic expansion of American imperialism over the past two centuries, or of Stevens’ appropriation of multiple Native American songs & cultures – for example the Iroquois – and how that does/does not differ from the ways in which European culture adopted & adapted much that it found here to its own purposes, Stevens’ tendency in his poems to sexualize experience – he’s a very male writer in that regard – which I don’t find at all in Sinavaiana.

By itself, this isn’t a book that proposes to change the world. Yet, in itself, it offers a vision of a much more healthy planet, of sharing & exchange & finding that place in the context of another’s experience in which one’s own perspective resonates. It would be great to have a lot more books like this in our lives.