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Transcription: [00:04:38]
{SPEAKER name="Sarah Fabio"}
and uh I am wondering did uh those people those people as poets later give you uh an avenue for returning and thinking that uh uh poetry might also have a power that you may have overlook?

[00:04:51]
{SPEAKER name="Maulana Karenga"}
very well spoken. I certainly did see, always eye into action in the movement was reciprocal mutual, ok, so like even as I influenced them in terms of laying a theoretical framework and developing the black esthetic for the movement, which I think is one of my most significant contributions as outlined in that Black aesthetic and in in a minute I'll give you what I think are the basic um uh parts of the basic elements of that in it, leaving that and uh developing that theoretical framework for them I in turn was influenced by their products ok, I am very influenced by Baraka I think that when he was poet when we was a Black Nationalist poet, that he made his greatest contribution to black literature. He set the tone for the movement, cause you know he's changed now, and I think his poetry and his literary work has suffered from it.

{SPEAKER name="Sarah Fabio"}
Right

[00:05:38]
{SPEAKER name="Maulana Karenga"}
because it's like an imposition of foreign material on what is essentially uh a a a gift that came out of the black experience, ok. now to deny that black experience to deny that validity of it and begin to talk in abstract, working class non-national poetry is to suffer. and what we've got to realize in that, is that what makes our work great is not that we claim universality for it but that we take the particulars so refined it and so developed it that it becomes a universal model and that the richness of all the poets and all the great literary um uh uh giants um their greatness depends not on their claiming a universality but reaching to their own roots finding inspiration and raw material, refining that and turning that into a masterpiece, so I think that's a mistake for people now to leave the movement, to deny their roots and try and start in the middle of the air. We don't live uh in the middle of the air we don't camp on