Tuli Kupferberg, Anarchist, Bohemian, Dead at 86
Albert Amateau
http://www.thevillager.com/villager_377/kupferg.html
Volume 80, Number 7
July 14 -21, 2010
Tuli Kupferberg, poet, singer and rambunctious jester, who was a
co-founder of the Fugs, the anarchic band of the 1960s, died Mon., July
12, in Manhattan at the age of 86.
In poor health for more than two years, he suffered two strokes last
year, according to Ed Sanders, his friend and fellow Fugs founder.
By the time Kupferberg was singing such songs as “Kill for Peace” with
the Fugs, he was an anthologized poet and a bohemian icon much loved by
the current inheritors of the Beats. He was a familiar figure at
counterculture events and peace rallies, offering his poetry and
drawings for sale.
“I’ve been truly blessed to have known Tuli,” said Clayton Patterson, an
artist and art organizer on the Lower East Side. “He’s one of the few
who had the ability and the strength to swim down, touch the bottom of
the ocean, resurface and tell us what treasures lay hidden in the
darkness where only the 1 percenters and the forgotten ones could see… .
I loved and respected Tuli,” Patterson said.
Robert Lederman, president of A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists’ Response to Illegal
State Tactics), also paid tribute to Kupferberg.
“Tuli was a longtime member of A.R.T.I.S.T. who in recent years sold his
art in Soho. He was a truly unique character with a biting sense of
humor,” Lederman said.
In an interview with him conducted in 2007, three of his friends, Steve
Dalachinsky, Jim Feast and Yuko Otomo, call Kupferberg “a provocative
humorist of the left… . At one moment he may be puncturing an inflated
windbag of media propaganda and at another slicing through the fatuous
rhetoric of a labor faker.”
In the interview, which is to appear in 2011 as part of a larger book —
“Jews: The People’s History of the Lower East Side,” edited by Dr.
Mareleyn Schneider and Patterson — Kupferberg spoke about his roots, his
childhood and life.
Naphtali Kupferberg was born in 1923 on the Lower East Side on Cannon
St. near the Williamsburg Bridge to immigrant parents who were part of
an extended Jewish family. The family moved to Yorkville and Kupferberg
went to Townsend Harris High School, an elite school located on E. 23rd
St. where Baruch College is now. At one point, he said to himself, “I’m
in the wrong place,” so he transferred to New Utrecht High School when
the family moved to Brooklyn. He went on to Brooklyn College in the
depth of the Depression where he was astounded to find Communists,
anarchists and Trotskyites.
Kupferberg was declared 4F and exempt from the draft during World War II.
Although attracted to the militant left, he knew he would not abide
party discipline.
He graduated from college and moved to Broome St. on the Lower East Side
where rents were cheap.
“I was paying $17 for a steam-heated apartment — a lot of money at the
time,” he recalled in the 2007 interview.
He talked of his membership in the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the
World), joining the War Resisters League and meeting Julian Beck and
Judith Malina of the Living Theatre and Paul Goodman, a radical educator
and writer.
Kupferberg was involved in Birth, a magazine that published LeRoi Jones,
Allen Ginsberg and Diane DiPalma. He joined his friend Sanders, who
published Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.
Kupferberg himself published Yaah: “It was a poetry magazine but it
published anything odd and strange,” he said.
Kupferberg’s last apartment was on the western edge of Soho, at Sixth
Ave. and Spring St., where he lived for many years.
“The place was just filled with books,” said Patterson. “It was like a
library. There was very little living space because there were so many
books.”
