Wu by Phyllis Wat

(United Artists 2015)

Like Bolano, the path for Phyllis Wat is through the familiar, mastering the details. In Wu: Going There, she goes there, traveling through the extra-ordinary ordinary dailiness at home, on the street and in films, operas, comics, dance, mathematical formulas. Her poems are thinking poems; the joy is the slipping away and breaking out of ideas, landing with a detail. Like Olson, her writing dances on the page. Truth is not a principle here, it is what is actually going on: “a woman with / a baby carriage on the street/ watering the trees.”   It is a delight to read Wu and put your ear and imagination under the guidance of Phyllis Wat.