Tuli Kupferberg

Matthew Paris writes:

Tuli was a legendary fixture of 60s culture, first at Le Metro, then one of the founders of the Fugs with Ed Sanders. He was the only guest on this show that had jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and survived. He lived into his 90s and was well known for sitting at a card table on the street in front of his home in Soho, offering strangers his inimitable sardonic banter and his books.

Tuli was part of that optimistic and articulate generation of young people who went to Brooklyn College in the 30s at the height of a radical student body and professorship in the 1930s. Like many of his generation, he was disappointed with the remedies of his age but was no less critical of the elites who had created the Great Depression, the Military-Industrial Establishment, etc. In the 50s Tuli lived in the Village and wrote free verse. He was developing a style that evolved slowly into the witty and comical demeanor he displayed in early poetry scenes like Le Metro in the 60s. He had a tremendous physical presence one couldn't explain. Even when he said nothing, he seemed to fill any room.

I became very friendly with Tuli during the next few decades. I admired him. Tuli was not just a scoffer and naysayer. He had devoted himself to marriage and raising a family. He had excellent relations with his children. He was also absolutely fearless. He might have been thrown into jail for running a bookstore in the East Village called Fuck You. He was also part of the political street rebellion in Chicago in 1968. He was also one of the poets long with Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed and Bob Dylan who put his lyrical talents into a rock group. He was a very adaptable man. He had come a long way from the Old Left.

Though Tuli was middle-aged when the 60s occurred, he always looked twenty years younger than he was. Even when he was 90 he had natural coal black hair. Physically he was tall, rangy, broad-shouldered, well set up. Since he was the resident clown of the Fugs he suggested by his public appearance on stage; he was on the grotesque side. In person, there was nothing weird about Tuli.

Tuli had a television show in the 80s and 90s on Public Access. It was topical. It gave a sense of Tuli as a cracker barrel philosopher that one couldn't get from the radio.

WNYC archives id: 85301