California Metaphysics

Abstract

California Metaphysics is a collection of poetry and aesthetic theory written between Fall 2018 and Spring 2020. The front matter addresses how my primary motivation for writing poetry is to explore the balance between reality and fantasy in the modern world. In today’s capitalistic society, work and play are ordered into a dichotomy that separates waking and dreaming life of labor and imagination. Labor is separated into a hierarchy of legitimate and illegitimate, devaluing emotional and imaginative labor and systemically ignoring the value of play. This work/play dichotomy operates like the Madonna-whore dichotomy, identified by feminist psychoanalysis, in that it reinforces capitalist conceptions of legitimate labor versus illegitimate labor. Using motifs of myth, my poetry aims to critique this fundamental separation between fantasy and reality, adult and child, work and play, inner and outer life. My reasons for doing so rely on theories of poetics articulating how the imaginative life of a child is subordinated under the larger narrative of adult labor.