Poem 1 Response: Beginning Again

This poem, honestly, kind of depressed me. The poem's first sentence even says, "If I could stop talking, I might begin to get well." After doing research on this author, I found that the writer, Franz Wright, struggled with drug and alcohol problems and depression. This information really shaped the way I looked at the poem, for the piece is definitely not a happy-go-lucky poem. The poem, with its somber tone is really the first thing that pops out at the reader. The reader gets the sense of the writer being lost and confused with the imagery that is given when he mentions trying to perform brain surgery on himself in a badly lit room with no mirrors, then does the complete opposite when talking about the room and how all the walls are mirrors. I took this more like him being in a crazy person's institution because the patient is trying to figure out what is wrong with them self (the brain surgery) and the institute around them (the walls with mirrors) represents that the patient is reminded of their reality and where the patient is at. Even the structure of this poem is interesting. There are four stanzas, all with different amount of lines, yet the third stanza only has one word: why? This makes me think that this word is important; it kind of sounds like what a crazy man would yell because of what he has become. The last stanza raps it up with the writer sitting with Li Po, a Chinese poet known for writing fantasy and was exiled from multiple countries for his beliefs, on a mountain until only the mountain exists. It was a kind of blissful way to end such a depressing poem with the author inferring that life goes on no matter how crazy that person gets.