How We Talk

How We Talk is a book of selected and new work by Bay Area poet and museum curator Renny Pritikin. Pritikin, who has been publishing his poems since the early 70s, draws upon the informal and personal work of the New York School--he studied with Paul Blackburn and Joel Oppenheimer--as well as the driving rhythms of Allen Ginsberg, whom he met while an undergraduate at Colgate University. These early narrative-driven influences are combined in his writing with the influences of the linguistic-oriented Language Poets of San Francisco, whose work he supported through residencies while directing New Langton Arts. Thus the style of the short works in How We Talk caroms back and forth between direct address to the reader and more abstract word play. Throughout is an interest in how we choose our words and how they attempt to convey meaning.