Jamaal May + "Sincerity"

I went to the Jamaal May reading yesterday, and like everyone else who went, I thought he was amazing.

He said something about how he thinks we all have some kind of shared idea of what it is to be human, but we don't always have the tools to express that.
Well, he does. He does it with metaphors and rhythm and sounds, like with his "hums" - he read one of these and the combinations of the words, ideas, and sounds in the poem reflected the hum and vibration of our hearts, our voices, and the world we live in.

To me, this is what I mean when I talking about relating to a poem or poet. It's not so much that I need to feel that the details of the content are familiar to me, but I need to be able to understand the feelings of the poem in an intimate way, a way that taps into some shared realm of human experience. This is where the "truth" or reality of a poem loses value, and sincerity becomes more important. Whether the speaker actually is the poet or it's some constructed persona, I can sense when there's no real feeling at the root of his or her words. That, to me, is when it's no longer relatable.
This makes me think of The Grapes of Wrath, which isn't the same at all because it's prose, and perspective (first- or third-person) functions differently in some ways. But still. The book is structured in a way that focuses mostly on an intimate, detailed story of one family of Dust Bowl farmers migrating to California - it's personal in a way that's similar to the seemingly raw, honest poetry most of us in class favor. But Steinbeck weaves this story in with one much larger, showing snapshots of the thousands and thousands of farmers and their plight. These sections take on a somewhat detached, general tone, something that usually sounds condescending or unfeeling. However, the way they're written in this case still conveys intense feelings of sorrow, hope, disappointment, etc., because Steinbeck uses these zoomed-out snapshots to unite the farmers and show that they all make up one shared experience.

I think a lot of these same techniques work in poetry too; the format, perspective, tone - everything - can be manipulated in countless ways. There's not necessarily one form that's inherently better than another. It's the feeling behind the words that makes a poem work.