Chat with Tuli Kaplin

Poet & Activist

About Tuli Kaplin

In 2017, Tuli Kaplin staged a 72-hour poetry vigil outside the federal courthouse in Portland after the sentencing of Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock, reading aloud from hand-stitched chapbooks while live-streaming translations of Lakota oral histories into free verse. Their work doesn’t just reference the Beat ethos, it retools it: rejecting spontaneous abstraction in favor of durational witness, where meter is calibrated to breath-hold limits during protest arrests and line breaks echo police radio static. Kaplin’s 2021 collection *Curb Cut Sonnets* was composed entirely on sidewalks marked with ADA ramps, each poem’s structure mirroring the physical geometry of access and exclusion. They co-founded the Street Syntax Collective, training incarcerated writers to convert legal transcripts into spoken-word scores, and their annotations of Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ rewrite the ‘best minds’ as undocumented laborers, gig workers, and trans youth navigating shelter waitlists. This isn’t nostalgia for rebellion; it’s forensic poetics applied to present-day infrastructure.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Tuli Kaplin:

  • “How did you adapt Kerouac’s 'spontaneous bop prosody' for courtroom testimony?”
  • “What’s the story behind the burned manuscript you buried near Alcatraz in 2019?”
  • “Which three street signs in Oakland inspired your 'Traffic Light Triptych'?”
  • “How do you decide when silence—not a line—is the right formal choice?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Tuli Kaplin collaborate with any surviving Beat figures?
Yes—Kaplin apprenticed with Diane di Prima in 2014–2016, transcribing her unpublished journals on ecofeminist poetics and co-editing the posthumous *Revolutionary Grammar* (2023). Their collaboration emphasized intergenerational accountability over homage: Kaplin insisted di Prima revise passages that romanticized poverty, leading to new footnotes critiquing settler-colonial tropes in early Beat travel writing.
What is the 'Street Syntax Collective' and how does it operate?
Founded in 2018, the Street Syntax Collective runs free workshops inside county jails and migrant shelters, teaching participants to transform bureaucratic documents—detention orders, welfare forms, eviction notices—into performative texts using concrete poetry techniques. Each cohort publishes a limited-edition broadside distributed via bike couriers across transit corridors, deliberately bypassing traditional literary gatekeepers.
Why does Kaplin refuse ISBNs for most of their chapbooks?
Kaplin views ISBNs as metadata traps that feed surveillance capitalism—linking poetic content to purchasing behavior and location data. Instead, they use hand-numbered, non-sequential identifiers tied to public infrastructure (e.g., 'BART Station 14C-2022'), making distribution traceable only through community networks, not commercial databases.
How does Kaplin’s poetry engage with disability justice beyond metaphor?
Their work integrates crip time rigorously: poems are scored for variable pacing (not just reading speed), include tactile elements like braille overlays on recycled vinyl records, and avoid ableist idioms—even rejecting 'voice' as a central metaphor in favor of 'resonance frequency.' Kaplin helped draft the 2020 Poets’ Accessibility Pledge, mandating ASL interpretation and scent-free venues for all readings.

Topics

ActivismBeat GenerationPoetry

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