It has become a tradition of interviews with Felix Dennis that they should include the words "colourful" or "maverick" within the first few sentences. Three-and-a-half decades after the scruffy young co-editor of Oz magazine was imprisoned following one of the landmark obscenity trials of the era, he is still rejoicing in this image, which has been untarnished by such humdrum business activities as publishing magazines called IT Pro and Auto Express.
Yet, as he paces around the kitchen of his Soho flat, preparing "a nice pot of tea" in a grey tracksuit and furry Ugg boots, I am struggling to see his maverick side. Yes, I am talking about poetry with a hedonistic publisher of lads' mags who owns 35 kitchens between Warwickshire and Mustique but the conversation has taken a disconcertingly reactionary turn.
"I hate to sound like a racist retired army colonel born in 1928 from Tunbridge Wells but why are airport security people searching my 89-year-old mother?" Dennis asks, his voice rising as the kettle boils. "How many middle-class, white, 89-year-old women have a history of attempting to blow up aeroplanes in mid-flight? The answer is none. Why aren't we searching every single person between the ages of 17 and 55 who gives the outward appearance of being a Muslim or who might be?" Somewhat stunned, I struggle to reply but Dennis steps in. "The answer, my friend, is political correctness."
The favourite bugbear of taxi drivers and talk radio hosts is also the chief target of Dennis's new book, a compilation of "nursery rhymes for modern times".
"When Jack Sued Jill is the continuation of a long, long tradition of nursery rhymes and street ballads, of gross satire," says Dennis. "My work doesn't stand comparison but at least I stand in the same line as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. This is using mockery to attack evil."
His targets include drug companies that "blind mice", the "idle spite" that saw off fox hunting, Enron's "crooked man", Europe's "massive socialist hug" and "The Grand Old Dub'ya Bush". Dennis is particularly apocalyptic about the war in Iraq, saying: "We look at ourselves in the mirror and are shocked to discover we're not Luke Skywalker, we're bloody Darth Vader."
But the greater modern evil, he argues, is the "pernicious folly" of political correctness, skewered in poems such as "Quota Rota", which begins: "The Chair is panic stricken:/'I'm afraid we're in a bind,/We've lost our single parent,/and the black Vice-chair's resigned.' " Political correctness, he argues, also ties the hands of the police, who are left "filling in forms to protect the human rights of criminals" rather than taking what he calls the Dixon of Dock Green position: "I'm 'ere, I'm always bloody 'ere. I know you, Dennis. I knew your brother and I knew your father before your brother and I've got my eye on you - that's community policing."
The one-time rebel now employs a private security force on his Warwickshire estate to make up for the absence of bobbies on the beat. He sounds relaxed about that favourite middle-England fear - "spotty adolescents sitting around in hoods, muttering and mumbling to each other just as I used to do" - but the colour rises in his cheeks and the volume rises again as he goes on. "If they burgle my house and I happen to have, as I do, a very large police truncheon nearby then I will whack them and I won't care how bloody hard I whack them either. And I'll take the consequences later."
A moment later, he is bellowing his trademark "HA HA HA HA HA HA HA" laugh again. These sudden shifts of tone, from the jocular to the jugular, have become a hallmark of Dennis's poetry readings. On his tours to promote his two previous volumes of verse, he leavens the more serious pieces in Lone Wolf and A Glass Half Full with the nursery rhymes he has been writing on and off for five years. "They all laugh their head off and all the tension's gone out of it and then I have the pleasure for the next five or 10 minutes of building the tension back in to the situation," he says. His performances have drawn uncommonly large audiences ("All my tours are called Did I Mention the Free Wine?" he notes) and helped sell more than 25,000 copies of A Glass Half Full alone - an extraordinary success for a book of poetry.
"To the enragement of certain sections of the poetry mafia - oh, I'm sorry, I mean establishment, HA HA, I do beg your pardon - the damn things won't stop selling." Dennis attributes this to the fact he writes in strict metre, using old-fashioned stanza forms. "I really cannot get on with free verse. Stuff doesn't have to rhyme but it must have structure for me to enjoy it and I believe most people feel the same." His last two books displayed a rich vocabulary and a remarkable range, from sonnets to sestinas and villanelles, and - as Dennis reminds me - have been performed by some of the Royal Shakespeare Company's finest and praised by the writer Tom Wolfe.
Dennis is very well-read and a collector of other writers' quotes but he has little time for some of the giants of 20th-century poetry. "I'm sure that Ezra Pound and Ted Hughes were wonderful poets. Quite frankly I can make very, very little of The Cantos. I've been through them, I'm a person of reasonable intelligence, I know that. I cannot make head nor tail of what Pound is writing about and after I've finished reading them I care less than I understand." He has a theory about why other poets' work has become so opaque: "People have less and less time to read poetry, so now a poet can't sell 25,000 copies in a day as Byron did. It's good to have an excuse. If you can make it so difficult to read almost no one can understand it, then you have a built-in excuse: 'The public is thick.' "
Unsurprisingly for a man who argues that Pound "mucked up" T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", Dennis has made plenty of enemies among his fellow poets, most recently when Andrew Motion chose five of his pieces for the British Poetry Archive - more than many "serious" poets merited. "They're all complaining bitterly [that] this rich bastard's rubbish is being put up there," he says, with relish. "The angry young men are becoming angry old farts."
Dennis, who turns 60 next year, is no playboy poet. Having taken up writing after a life-threatening illness in 1999, he now sets aside three hours a day for his poetry. "I've got absolutely no idea why I do it but I get very irritated if I don't do it every day." It seems a strangely contemplative pursuit for a man with a multimillion-pound publishing empire, I venture, but he corrects me: "The art itself is anything but contemplative. It's hard bloody work." But how does a busy executive clear three hours a day to write? "I own no mobile device, let alone a BlackBerry. I don't accept any e-mails and I surround myself with extremely talented PAs, whose job it is to ensure that I don't meet anybody unless I wish to," he laughs.
He is now going one step further, trying to ban e-mails within the company. "E-mails for senior executives are madness. They're just bunking off work," he explains. "While it's true that I want every single person who works for me to have a mobile superglued to the side of their head so that I can call them on the off-chance I wish to, is this really a good thing?" Isn't that rather hypocritical? "I'm a capitalist, you stupid . . . Of course it's hypocritical! Capitalism is built on hypocrisy. It's one of its main pillars. One for you, 99 for me. HA HA HA HA HA."
As one of his talented PAs answers his call for a glass of wine, Dennis pushes his bifocals back up his nose to talk for a moment about his business, which spans titles that include Maxim, Blender and The Week. "I delegate like a champion [and] I do my level best to run a real meritocracy. It's a lot harder than you think and it's made harder by government rules and regulations, because most people who employ hundreds of people find ourselves having to keep a lot of duffers on because it'll cost us too much to get rid of them."
But we are here to talk about poetry, which is clearly Dennis's passion. In his last book, How To Get Rich, he wrote: "There's nothing intrinsically wrong with orgies, parties, narcotics and booze - but they WILL kill you in the end. If I had spent the thousands of nights writing poetry that I spent playing the fool to keep boredom at bay, I would be a happier, healthier man today." Confusingly, given his admissions in the past to "eight or nine lost years" of girls and drugs, Dennis insists that his party reputation "has been invented entirely by the media". Journalists rehash what they find on search engines, he says: "There is much more media to fill up than there ever was. There are more holes between the ads. As the spaces between the ads multiply exponentially, so the quantity of rubbish multiplies exponentially. I'm one of the few people that accepts a lot of interviews and doesn't complain about it. AND I'M NOT COMPLAINING ABOUT IT NOW," he roars.
Given Dennis's media empire, though, why choose to vent his views in poetry rather than yield to the traditional mogul's temptation? His answer is strictly business: "Why don't I put this on the front cover of my magazines? Because my magazines are there to entertain my readers and to make me money. That's it. I'm not going to load them up with my baggage."
