Tuli Kupferberg

My favorite person of the day is Tuli Kupferberg. A contemporary of Kerouac, Kupferberg is a poet, cartoonist, author and anarchist. He wrote 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft in 1967, co-founded the band The Fugs, and is now writing things called I Hate Poems About Poems About Poems, and Teach Yourself Fucking. Anyway, none of these things are the reasons for which Tuli Kupferberg is my favorite person of the day. One reason is that he also wrote 1001 Ways to Live Without Working, on folded sheets of 8 1/2 by 11 paper and sold it on the street himself. But the main reason is this passage out of the prose poem "Memorial Day 1971" written by Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman:

I asked Tuli Kupferberg once, "Did you really jump off of The Manhattan Bridge?" "Yeah," he said, "I really did." "How come?" I said. "I thought that I had lost the ability to love," Tuli said. "So, I figured I might as well be dead. So, I went one night to the top of The Manhattan Bridge, & after a few minutes, I jumped off." "That's amazing," I said. "Yeah," Tuli said, "but nothing happened. I landed in the water, & I wasn't dead. So I swam ashore, & went home, & took a bath, & went to bed. Nobody even noticed."