Felix Dennis: 'I'm 55. I'm rich. I don't need this tyranny'

Felix Dennis knows whose side he is on in the great Turner Prize debate, and Kim Howells can take heart from him. "I've always made it a rule not to mock cripples," the publishing magnate declares with withering scorn. "I'm not even going to dignify that nonsense by discussing it."

But as someone whose magazine empire has made him the 56th richest man in Britain – with a personal fortune estimated at £500m – he can't resist doing so. "These people are so far up their own arses they literally can't see daylight. It's just complete rubbish."

Truly this hero of the counter-culture has come a long way since he, Richard Neville and Jim Anderson rocked the Establishment with the "Schoolkids" issue of Oz magazine and their subsequent trial on obscenity charges in 1971. But when Dennis looks back he says he doesn't recognise the young man he was then, and while he remains passionately libertarian in many of his views – on drugs, for example, and on sexual fidelity (he doesn't believe in it) – in other ways he is all for order, discipline and tradition.

These, at any rate, are some of the qualities that come through in the venture that in the past three years has taken over Dennis's life – poetry. Precisely metred, rhyming poetry that many in London's literary scene deride, maybe in part because it pours out of Dennis in a continuous stream without any of the struggle that is supposed to be attendant upon great work. "The struggle is in resisting trying to control it," Dennis says.

Now he has a book of poems coming out – a mixture of 19th-century-style elegies and barbed, Dorothy Parker-esque comments on contemporary life – and on 11 November begins a nationwide tour of poetry readings for which the audience not only gets in free but is treated to fine wine. A vanity project it may be, but there's something about the way this Falstaffian figure has thrown himself into it – just as he has thrown himself into life in general – that one can't help admiring.

Dennis says that he doesn't understand why the poetry has happened. He never had literary leanings of this kind before. When inspiration strikes, there's nothing he can do about it, and he worries that it is threatening his ability to keep on top of his day job, as chairman of the company that produces, among other publications, Maxim (the biggest- selling men's lifestyle magazine in the world), The Week and a raft of hugely profitable computer titles.

"Lines just come to me," he says over a sandwich and a glass of wine in the book-lined flat he keeps above his office in London's West End. (He has other homes in Warwickshire, New York, Connecticut and Mustique.) "I don't know why. I'm 55. I have more money than is good for me. I have a fantastic life. I have lovely friends, and homes all over the world. I adore sharing wine with people. I plant trees. I commission brass sculptures. I don't need anything. Why do I find myself not just imposed upon by a muse I did not ask for and knew nothing about – I'm tyrannised. It's bloody tyranny. Every single day. And in many ways I'm getting bloody fed up with it."

The first poem came to Dennis in September 1999 when he was seriously ill in hospital. Years of drug abuse had taken their toll, and as he came to his senses, so the lines began to materialise. Until then his creative outlet was provided by cocaine-fuelled evenings with friends and "beautiful women". Now he's put all that behind him – the cocaine, anyway – and says he won't go back to it unless he's told he's got cancer.

"I'll call up my chief constable and I'll tell him exactly what I'm doing and he'll say, 'Get on with it, son, how many months have you got?' That's the way I'll go. I shan't be doing any of this chemo, that's for sure."

So are you secretly hoping to be told you've got cancer? "What a hideous thought. There is an element of truth in that, though, but just because there's an element of truth doesn't make it true."

One way and another, Dennis is the master of the great escape. He says his success in business is "compensation for the poverty of my upbringing", which saw him and his younger brother living with their grandmother in a south London suburb in the years just after the Second World War with no electricity and no bathroom. His father disappeared to Australia when Felix was two, while his mother trained to become one of the country's first female chartered accountants. He left school at 15, and in spite of being labelled by the Oz trial judge as the least intelligent of the three defendants, he's the one who's gone on to the greatest success.

Never married, he has managed to maintain multiple relationships at the same time, though now he has largely settled down with one woman. Wouldn't he have liked children? "I've got 12 godchildren and that's marvellous. I think I'm too much of a coward to have had my own. But that's as close to a regret as I'll sail."

'A Glass Half Full' is published by Hutchinson on Thursday at £6.99. Felix Dennis's poetry tour 'Did I Mention the Free Wine?' begins at the Naval and Military Club, London SW1, on 11 November, before going on to Brighton, Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham, Oxford, Grasmere, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Stratford and returning to London on 6 December.

1947 Born Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey.

1962 Leaves school to join blues band and sell magazines.

1971 As co-editor of Oz, tried on obscenity charges.

1973 Founds the company that grows into Dennis Publishing, making him the 56th richest man in Britain. Begins planting trees and commissioning brass sculpture.

1999 Falls seriously ill and begins writing poetry.

2002 Publishes first volume of poetry, A Glass Half Full.