Viz owner Felix Dennis publishes new poetry book

Sep 16 2010 by David Whetstone, The Journal

THE man who owns Viz is coming to read us his poems. But DAVID WHETSTONE talks trees with the charismatic Felix Dennis.

PLENTY of poets pad soundlessly about the place, preferring to express themselves through the written word alone. This is far from being Felix Dennis’s style.

By his own admission, he is “a somewhat noisome beast”. And while it’s likely you will think of him more as multi-millionaire publisher than poet, he does write poems and has published quite a lot of them.

His latest volume is Tales from the Woods. It does not, as many of these things do, slip humbly on to a reviewer’s desk, feather-light and camouflaged in the type of cover designed to blend in with hundreds of other slim books on a dusty shelf.

It’s a chunky hardback covered in stickers and lavishly illustrated. “Free inside – spoken-word audio CD” proclaims one sticker. “Buy this book to plant a tree!” declares another. There are also recommendations from Stephen Fry and American writer Tom Wolfe, who obligingly called Dennis “a 21st Century Kipling”.

From its pages, meanwhile, tumbles a small avalanche of further endorsements, including details of a national tour called Did I Mention the Free Wine?

Say what you like about Felix Dennis’s poems, you can hardly fault his marketing panache.

The tour, with its wine, will bring the man and his lion’s mane of hair to Newcastle next month and he confidently expects a sizeable audience. So has he been here before?

“Many times,” he roars. “I’m the publisher of Viz and one of my very best friends in the world comes from Newcastle. Actually he’s in the oil business and is in the United Arab Emirates.