Rich in Words

With three best selling volumes of poetry to his name, publisher, Felix Dennis has taken the traditional poetry establishment by the scruff of the neck, and given it just a bit more than a gentle shake. Fergus Byrne asked him to judge the Marshwood Vale Magazine poetry competition.

Some remember his name associated with their favourite computer as they perused MacUser. Some associate him with their weekly update of everything newsworthy around the world, while they read The Week. Others think of him while chuckling their way through Viz magazine or Maxim or Bizarre, and those with longer memories will hark back to what, at the time, was the longest obscenity trial in British legal history, when he was sent to jail during his association with the legendary sixties Oz magazine. However, no matter what it is in Felix Dennis’s publishing empire that people think of, it is surely his poetry that will be his greatest legacy – apart, perhaps, from the thousands of trees he is currently planting in Warickshire.
Felix Dennis has said that poetry is his ‘fully fledged obsession’ and that may come as a surprise to some who have only glimpsed moments from his hugely successful publishing career. In 1971 he was an editor on the magazine that was a thorn in the side of an already grumpy establishment. An establishment that wanted to give a few of those damn hippies a piece of its mind. Along came a missunderstood issue of the satirical Oz magazine and a chance to crush some of those that represented the hippy counter-culture. A drawn out obsenity trial followed, which, although subsequently found to be riddled with corruption and political involvement, put Felix Dennis into jail. What perhaps stung more than the jail sentance was the judges’ comment that Dennis should have a lighter sentance than his colleagues, because he had not been to University and was therefore less intelligent. Today his publishing empire has made him one of the richest men in England and he spends his time between homes in the UK, America and the tropical island of Mustique. It seems a long way from the days when he squirted David Frost with a water pistol in the sort of TV rumpus that The Sex Pistols emulated many years later with Bill Grundy, but in many ways Felix Dennis is still the rebel flying in the face of the establishment – this time the poetry establishment.
It was at his Caribbean home that he recently read the final poems in our poetry competition to dinner guests . “I read them each, four times.” he said. “The last time aloud to a circle of dinner guests. That was as near as I could come to being ‘fair’, the problem being that I am not a particularly ‘fair’ person; I am a man who passionately believes in meritocracy and talent, a man who cannot subscribe to the new mantras of political correctness demanding that there be prizes for all – including prizes for trying.” Anyone who has read any of Felix Dennis’s books will know he has cellar full of memories and can come up with a quote from a published poet at the drop of a hat. Referring to poetry, he quotes Emily Dickinson, ‘If it blows the top of your head off, that is poetry.’ “This is probably the best advice any poet can cleave to” he says. “Personally, I happen to prefer traditional rhyme, meter and poetic forms – a dangerous heresy in what the American author, Tom Wolfe, calls ‘the poor old mallarme’d and ezrapounded world of contemporary poetry’. But personal preference is not the cardinal issue. What counts is surely whether a poem touches us, amuses us, entertains or moves us.”
Tom Wolfe is one member of a diverse group of admirers, from Mick Jagger to Melvyn Bragg – Wolfe refers to Felix Dennis as ‘a 21st century Kipling’. The list of acclaim from those that have appreciated his work is lengthy and the one that perhaps ought to feature highly on the kudos scale is the fact that the Royal Shakespeare Company has presented evenings of his poetry to packed houses on both sides of the Atlantic.
Referring to the Marshwood Vale Magazine poetry competition he says, “Poetry competitions, too, are an odd thing. Should a poet, anxious to be published, craft a new pair of custom made boots to fulfill the criteria of a given subject matter? Or can an earlier pair be re-cobbled with new soles that may appear (just) to fit the bill? I sensed that the latter course had been adopted in one or two entries – but no matter. The claim that ‘art lies in the concealment of the art’ is as true to today as it was in ancient Rome.”

“The chosen subject, ‘Home’, was a devilish choice. An emotive term with meanings that take up a page and a half in ‘The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary’, it both provided a trap for the overly sentimental, a launching pad for explorer-types and a beacon for ‘the hunter home from the hill’. All these categories, and more, were represented.”
As in all competitions there has to be a winner and this year it is E. Foster from Yarcombe near Honiton whose poem is published here. There were also three runners up whos poems will be published in subsequent issues of this magazine.