Paul Thiel ran with the Beats and the Warhol Factory
For many years, until they changed the closing time, my wife and I could be found most Sunday afternoons at the YMCA in our suburb of St. Louis. I had a routine — start with cardio like the treadmill or stationary bike and finish in the Cybex machine room. There was a fairly regular crowd there each Sunday, working out from about 5 to 6 p.m. One of those regulars was an older man, about six-foot-five. We knew him as Paul.
My wife started chatting with him first. And then he spoke to me one Sunday, saying he’d heard I was from New Orleans. He had relatives there, too, even though he was from St. Louis. We’d talk while on the Cybex machines, and he didn’t say much about his own life, other than he liked poetry as much as I did and he loved to visit New Orleans.
Paul Thiel
One Sunday, shortly before the COVID lockdown in 2020, he said something out of the blue. He didn’t look particularly well, and I asked him if he was feeling okay. “I have cancer,” he said. “They’ve found it all over my body.” There’s not much one can say to that, except expressing sorrow and concern. After the lockdown was over, I’d still see him at the Y, working out and still looking the same.
And then I didn’t see him. I asked the Y manager if he knew anything, and he said Paul had changed the days he came in. That was how I kept tabs on him. And then one Sunday afternoon, about a year ago, I was on a long walk. I could see him coming toward me from a distance; his height was an immediate identifier. He was using a cane and walking slowly, but walking nonetheless.
I asked him how he was, and he said it likely wouldn’t be long. I repeated what we had told him when the diagnosis first came in, that we would pray for him. He wasn’t religious, but he seemed touched that someone would pray for him.
I saw the obituary in early December. I was in for two shocks. First, he had just turned 88; I would have thought he was at least 10 years younger. Second, the obituary told the story of his life.
Paul Thiel had lived in San Francisco in the 1950s and run with the Beat poets. He knew them all — Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and the rest. He had lived in New York City in the 1960s and was part of the Factory crowd presided over by Andy Warhol. Thiel was a published poet. He had edited a collection of short stories.
I went to Amazon. Sure enough, two books were listed under Thiel’s name. Under the Arch: St. Louis Stories was published in 2005. Snapshots: Verbal Pictures – Poetry was published in 2024. (He had also published a book of sonnets in 2004, but I can’t find a reference.)
Snapshots comprises 88 poems, and a quick glance at the times explains what the collection is about. It’s part autobiography, part memoir, an effort to remember his life and perhaps to be remembered as well. In the introduction, itself a poem, Thiel explains how he encountered the Beat poets in his “vagabond” days; met underground and way-way-off Broadway playwrights; and encountered interesting people like Ann, who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and survived. He writes that these are all random images in his life, “88 keys in my concerto.”
The titles are mostly names, some of relatives and some of writers and artists Thiel knew. People like poet Charles Bukowski, artist Robert Rauschenberg, writer William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, opera singer Joan Sutherland, Sharon Olds (he took a class in poetry taught by her), Dakin Williams (Tennessee’s brother), and Andy Warhol.
Andy Warhol
Snapshots Thiel
White-haired ghost tripper around NYC
Silent as he watched. Surveying the terrain
With part of his entourage. Probably making
Snide remarks quietly as he observed
These trips were unannounced, spontaneous
Then in a whisk he was gone. You wondered
What did I see? Although his appearance
Was fairly frequent for a star, it nevertheless
Created an expectation of a happening
It is rumored that he lived in a cave with them
The Factory it was called and drug ridden
It was supposed. I don’t know. I wasn’t there
I heard that he actually resided in some secret
Hideaway all alone away from the Super Stars
He created magnifying their otherwise
Mundane egos. Anyone could have 15 minutes
Of fame, he attested and with his backing
They did, flocking to the doors of the Factory
Holly, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, Eric Emerson
Super Stars to flourish during their moment
In his own way. Andy created a new world
Had I known, I could have told Paul about my only connection to Warhol. When I was a reporter for my college newspaper, I was assigned to review a Warhol movie called Trash. I saw it, reviewed it, and never forgave the editor who assigned it to me. For me, the title explained everything I needed to know.
All the poems in Snapshots are in the same style — truthful, keenly observed, and sometimes flattering and sometimes not (even to the point of self-deprecation).
Thiel didn’t intend to be a poet. In college, he studied geology and was, in fact, in a doctoral studies program at the University of Montana when he abandoned college and headed for San Francisco. After his time there and in countercultural New York City, he returned to St. Louis and worked in real estate.
But he never lost his love for poetry. He became involved in the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival, taught creative writing, and attended and taught at writing workshops. He also organized a longstanding annual tribute to the Beat poets, following the death of Allen Ginsberg in 1997.
Thiel wasn’t one of the main players in the Beat generation or the Warhol era, but he knew who the players were, met most of them, and was close to a few. He also observed them, and wrote about them, with an unbiased eye.
And here he was, this tall, lanky man, working out on the Cybex machine next to me at the Y, chatting about the Y and workouts and new Orleans, and I never knew his connection to poetry.
Photo by Andrew E. Larsen, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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Bethany says
Oh my goodness Glynn, what a special encounter. Thank you for telling us a bit about it and about his work.