A multi-millionaire, a lads mag publisher, who was prosecuted for obscenity before anyone had ever heard of Loaded; a former crack-cocaine addict and friend of John Lennon.
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Dennis recorded a single with John Lennon. If you're one of the richest people in the country and you've finished with your sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll years, what next? When you're facing a life-threatening illness, what really matters? For publisher Felix Dennis, it's poetry. A veteran of controversy since his days with the hippy Oz magazine, he describes himself as in the grip of a "fully-fledged obsession". |
| His latest book of verse is a wise-cracking update on traditional nursery rhymes - called Nursery Rhymes for Modern Times: When Jack Sued Jill - attacking political correctness, Asbo culture and various forms of hypocrisy. But where does this compulsion to write come from? "I don't know - I just know that I become immensely irritable if I don't write," says Mr Dennis. |
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He can even precisely date the point at which he began writing verse, and produces the Post-it note on which his first poem was penned in September 1999.
He was in hospital undergoing tests for a thyroid condition (from which he has since recovered) and his previous highs had been more chemical than lyrical 'Snobbery' "I needed something utterly absorbing and gripping, when I wasn't doing business. Maybe I was sub-consciously looking for something. And I certainly found it.
