While Killian states that one of the differences between Language Poets and New Narrative writers is the Language Poets' knowledge of theory, Glück says that the New Narrative has its inspiration in the theorists Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, and Georges Bataille. For Killian and other New Narrative writers, the key difference here is more than simply whether or not New Narrative works use theory in general; rather, these New Narrativists are drawing our attention to their distinctly punk means of learning theory in the first place. Far from the ivory tower origins of most LANGUAGE Poetry, New Narrative writers often came into a theoretical and philosophical maturity via the free, open-to-the-public workshops that were something between a book club, a street protest, and a lecture hall.