Poets Watching Themselves in the Process of Thinking: Cases of Metacognitive Frontality in Peninsular Contemporary Poetry

Abstract

Some of the contemporary Spanish poets are re-elaborating the romantic tradition of describing the neural state of consciousness and processes of meaning-making in meditative poems. These texts are constructed as lyric mechanisms whereby the poets describe themselves seeing or thinking in themselves thinking or seeing. The brain in these oeuvres appears to be a spatial landscape or scene in which the representation is portraited as an act of embodied visual language or a question about the boundaries of poetic discourse to express thoughts. In a significant evidence of self-consciousness, some of these poets even use terms or concepts taken from neuroscience. Those procedures may be seen as cases of metacognitivism linked to the result a huge neural activity located in the prefrontal cortex. This article explores a cognitive reading of these poems from a neuroscientific perspective, in order to discern new dimensions of metapoetic self-exploration or meta-self-exploratory poetry.