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Artist Statement

I remember sitting on that rickety dock at Silver Lake, with my feet dangling just above the water. I’d stretch my foot out like a ballerina practicing pointe, and break the still water’s surface with the tips of my toes. So long as the sun was out, my mind rested well, knowing without a doubt that I could find my mother in the garden, tending to whatever we’d be having for dinner a few weeks from the day. Before my brother took over his role as head of the house, my father sold factory real-estate all throughout northeastern New Jersey. It was the creative act that saved my heart after he went away. It was on that lonely land that I became a poet.

My name is Anna Reidister and I am a post-pastoral poet in the pre-de-industrialized era working predominantly in what will come to be known as Perfect Poetry, an artifact of “secret art.” Currently in my work I seek to redefine concepts. I explore notions of classism and spontaneity as a means of disintegrating global politics. I juxtapose radical organic imagery with the playfulness of slant rhymes. My latest collection of poetry, Approaching Perfection, explores my relationship with cognition as a woman, particularly a woman in “secret art.” My work should, within the next decade, catalyze a global A.O.B. (Abolition of Borders).

While I can’t talk about “secret art,” I can speak of its imagistic sister movement, Pennsylvania Gunk. PG, as it’s often called by its practitioners, is a post-gunk practice currently emerging out of Lower North Philadelphia's DIY scene. While it fully embraces the traditional subject-object relationships in gunk, it rejects the notion that Pure Image can be produced consensually. The pioneer of the movement, Sean Khulman, states that “[Pure Image] hasn’t been achieved in art nor nature, by man nor God; that is obvious. If it had, the world would weigh very little. Something has got to break, and that something is the muse.” According to Khulman’s Cognitive Clog Theory, however, Pure Image cannot coexist with industrial society, which, thus inhibits the invention and practice of Perfect Poetry.

In Approaching Perfection, my seminal collection of neo-prose, I paint a linguistic portrait of an upcoming world in which Perfect Poetry can be attained. It is an exercise in the art of patience, while we wait for the declogging. The cognitive cleansing of neural networks will generate space for pure, undiluted creative expression. The speaker, a PG psychic hailing from what once was known as Philadelphia, is torn between his love for the muse and his duty to art in pre-de-industrialized society. He grapples with his fear of the destruction of the subject and the collapse of contemporary art. Taking inspiration from the impulses of Sean Khulman’s writing, each poem is drafted, edited, and completed entirely subconsciously.  Each lyrical line is no longer than fourteen letters to achieve a certain suppleness in form and to reflect the buoyancy of a mind unburdened by bureaucracy. I break the fourth wall to recontextualize the speaker’s disillusionment with legislation. The challenge in my work is to see beyond the here and now and into the new world at our doorstep.

When my mentor, Isaiah Sánchez, gets off parole, He will produce a series of Polaroids depicting the day-to-day struggles of Amish sex workers in the city that will come to be known as The American Gamorrah. With each of His photographs, He’ll include a sonnet, extracted, unadulterated, from the subconscious of the subject; this will be, for all intents and purposes, a sacrificial act. It is in this moment that the door to Perfect Poetry will crack open, and Isaiah’s Light will be able to grace the world’s people. Under his tutelage, my poetry will be--to the rest of poetry--what a plate of grease is to a flock of gulls.