FELIX DENNIS - FROM PRISON
TO POETRY A JOURNEY FROM THE HEART
Andy McDonald
Felix Dennis, is surely the rarest of big beasts in
the contemporary colourful forest of poetic endeavour - he is for many a star, a
British poet of acknowledged profound spiritual impulse, who unusually, came to
writing poetry at the age of 51 while recovering from illness in 1999. For us, the informed reader the good news is
that out of his illness he found the enlightenment of poetry and not God!!
Hell, that's just as well or we would be wading through volumes of scripture
rather than ‘script!'
Amongst other things, Dennis is also a self proclaimed
lover of copious amounts of French red wines, an active environmental advocate
of forestry preservation, and in his time he has been a crack addict, sent to
jail for obscenity, one time mate of John Lennon and a millionaire publisher. Clearly
he is no shrinking violet.
Dennis has recently launched his 5th collection of original verse, Homeless in My Heart, to critical
acclaim, his poetic apotheosis, following on from his previous poetry
collections, A Glass Half Full, Lone Wolf,
When Jack Sued Jill, and Island of Dreams, Dennis believes his
new anthology of 105 poems to be his best to date, where for him, "Homeless in My Heart is a coming of age.
This collection of poetry then is Dennis
emerging out of the short trousers of recalcitrant ‘youth' into a suited, ‘mature'
exponent of poetic production. Or, as the author himself prosaically, comments,
"This is the story of a fool whose life is saved by poetry. The poems have
poured out of me in a cataract, like a dam breaking. I cannot know what is left
in the reservoir, but, for me at least, Homeless
in My Heart is a coming of age, where form, muse and craft have
finally ceased their adolescent warring."
Felix Dennis is clearly an interesting character, enigmatic
firebrand, someone you could happily spend hours in the tavern of life with,
whiling away the hours soberly (sic) sharing stories, odes, poems, elegies, jokes,
epigrams and anecdotes. In the absence of meeting him in the flesh, the next
best thing is to read his poems and listen to them on the spoke book CD that
accompanies Homeless in My Heart, or
attend one of his many poetry readings which are cryptically called, "Did I mention the Wine Was free?" The
latter are not to be missed, multi media extravaganzas that amount to a white
knuckle roller coaster ride - enjoyment in the extreme - an evening of
enjoyment that passes in a instant, an evening that is a feats of frolics,
frivolity, fun and yes, fine wine and finer poetry.
Reading the poetry of Dennis reminds me, however
vaguely, in passing, given his passion for red wine, of the 13th
Century Persian poet, Rumi, who wrote about, "admiring wines," and,
"Wandering
inside the red world."
It strikes this particular reader, who himself is
partial to the world of intoxicating liquor, that, like the many wines in the
wine bar of life, Dennis's poetry draws
on a fermented strength that can induce melancholy, madness, inspiration and inebriation
of the senses in equal measure.
Dennis himself told the BBC in an interview in 2006,
that:
"I needed something utterly absorbing and gripping
(poetry), when I wasn't doing business. Maybe I was sub-consciously looking for
something. And I certainly found it. When you are writing, you're in a totally
different zone...I can start a difficult poem and look up at the clock and see to
my astonishment that three hours have passed. Instead of taking crack cocaine,
going out with whores and boozing. I'll sit down alone in a room and have just
as much fun."
Given that Dennis found poetry following illness, one
can reasonably suggest that his illness
proved to be a road to Damascus experience, no doubt a bit like entering Jack
London's world of ‘John Barleycorn,' in ‘last chance saloon,' and emerging from
it, deciding to hitch his wagon to something more meaningful. Then again, maybe not quite the same journey to writing as
London, after all, Jack London who dies
of ureic poisoning aged 40, reputedly wrote
15 hours a day and sometimes thought nothing of writing for 2 days solid
without sustenance or sleep whilst by paltry comparison, Dennis admits to writing for a modest 3 hours a per
day. Okay, the comparison is somewhat unfair for London wrote 400 non- fiction works, 200 stories, 3 plays and 20 novels, whilst our
man writes poetry and has 1,400+ poems to his name. Relatively, speaking,
nevertheless, Dennis, ‘the lone wolf,'
is in exalted company.
TS Elliot reckoned that you don't have to understand poetry
to enjoy it, which in my case is just as well. Fortunately, I have the clarity
of interpretation to understand that in his work Dennis is drawing, as many
writers and poets do, on learned, reflective, observations from his own lived
diary of experiences - his life is his raw material.
Fundamental to Dennis's literary charm and identity is
the self conscious reflection of his life in his poems. Indeed, in many of the
poems, perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a clear link between poetry and autobiographical
truth. For Dennis, it seems his investment in ‘real' life has yielded a return
of profitable poetry, a poetry that has becomes an abstract art, which in turn
becomes itself a great life form. Thus, many of the poems in the book are a
portrait of many personal reflections that reflect back to the reader, Dorian
Gray like, where we see the poetry of despair, disillusionment and
disappointment. Take the self
referential poems such as, I have Paid
More for a Kiss:
"I have paid more for a kiss than a kiss
And that was error, sure -
Sucking on chemical bliss
In the tattooed arms of a store - bought whore.
You may blame me, certainly, if you wish..."
Likewise, Addiction and wrestling with the demon
of temptation beyond endurance that lingers in the addicts mind, surely an
example of what Mathew Arnold, in 1853, termed, "the mind's dialogue with
itself:
"I can't
You can't? We both know what
we need.
I CAN'T!
You see? The tiger needs to
feed....
Get out.
To where? I live inside your
head.
Get OUT!
No dice. I'll sleep when I've
been fed....
Just one.
Yeah, sure - one goddam
motherlode.
Just ONE!
Just one. And one more for
the road."
Then we have a passing nod to Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Goal, the poem, the
arresting, bitter sweet, Old Bailey,
yet another attempt to embrace the past describing his brush with the coercive apparatus of the state, the police, courts,
politicians prison. This is a world where Prison is brutal and brutalising,
"Where, the jackal lies with lamb," a world, "Where coppers as bent as a hinge
march in and bellow their trade." Where,
"the stick-brittle words of a judge with his ‘duty to perform' (serving as a
politician's grudge)," lead to "the slam of the Old Bailey's iron door." This is a world where there are more negatives
than positives, a theme expounded in the
poem, "Dementia:"
"Lord save me from the stench
of bowel and tract,
From nurses with their hearty
cries and broth,
From surgeons with their
jargon and their tact,
Lord send me strength to vent
a mighty wrath."
The other side to Dennis' poetry is that of Felix the
light hearted, the wordsmith who pokes gentle fun at the human condition (and
the human out of condition for that matter). Take, Rude Awakening, a sonnet of 14 lines as
practised by Shakespeare in 3 quatrains and a rhyming couplet:
I thought I'd die when he
asked me out,
I wanted to cry, I wanted to
shout,
I wanted my friends to know -
to share it,
(And all the rest could grin
and bear it),
I wanted those cows who paint
their zits
And pour and pose and flaunt
their tits
To know that none of them
stood a chance,
That he and I were going to
dance,
That I'd be wearing no
underwear
And I'd tell him, too - so
let them stare,
I couldn't care less what
anyone said,
And I hoped they'd guess we'd
been to bed.
Oh, I thought I'd love him
evermore:
But that was before I heard him snore!"
Shakespeare in one of his love sonnets ended a stanza
thus, "Therefore I lie with her and she with me, And in our faults by lies we
flatter'd be."
Some of Dennis' poems bridge from the past into the
modern world, in his own particular voice, the vocabulary of the modern age -
take the notion of love as a "loaded taser," or joining, "Poets Anonymous," and
the 21st references and metaphors of "Of Course you Do..." The later
poem exudes a refreshing simplicity of expression referring to current
realities, , acid rain global warming, perverts, trips to school in
juggernauts, mobile phones, botox, and iPods.
On occasion in the collection we bear witness to the
poet lover, the poet as free spirit, the poet father, the poet historian, the
poet rascal. Who knows maybe one day Dennis will become a poet laureate?
Borges the Argentine writer and poet once wrote in his
foreword to his 1964 edition of Obra Poetica that:
"One of three fates awaits Book of poetry: it may be
relegated to oblivion, it may not leave behind a single line and yet give a
sufficient picture of the man who wrote it, or it may bequeath a few poems to
the anthology."
With respect to Dennis, I suspect it will be a case
of the latter...
The poems in Homeless
in My Heart are illustrated throughout the book by a vivid selection of elemental
photographic images from the archives of the Science Photo Library and National
Geographic Society.
Homeless in My Heart, £12.99, is published by Ebury Press, London (ISBN 0-09-192800-1). The book contains a free 70 minute spoken word audio CD
of poems. See further, http://www.felixdennis.com/
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