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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
As Dennis commented at the reading, "The English are not unused to dealing with a certain level of contradiction." A cur who is in fact able to keep himself in most companies, Dennis is a man of contradictions: a Mustique dweller who sells to the proletariat, a peddler of impossible female forms who chides women about self-alteration, a soft-core balladeer, a recovering crack addict who passes time with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
"Some of [Dennis' poetry] is quite good," RSC actor Sean Bean told me at the reading after-party, before actress Samantha Bond bade him goodnight with a kiss on the cheek and a whispered "Bizarre!" that seemed to sum up the evening.
But a collaboration with the world's preeminent dramatists hasn't rid Dennis of the chip on his shoulder about his perceived exclusion from the poetry community. I had no more said, "So about your poetry..." than Dennis launched unbidden into a minutes-long monologue in defense of metered verse. "I'm putting forward the alternate view, that you do not have to write free verse to be a great poet," he said, after expressing his enthusiasm for Donne, Herrick, Browning and Keats and his distaste for free verse. Dennis' poetry -- which is actually pretty fun to hear out loud -- recalls the work of Shel Silverstein, whose poems were filled with satisfyingly rhymed ditties about the harmless, if dark, desires of childhood.
Like continuations of Silverstein's poems, Dennis' focus on some of the grim realities of adult life: sexually active grandmothers, firing people, blowing off business meetings in favor of a quickie, cocaine. He employs classical forms -- quatrains, sonnets, ballads, sestinas -- which he taught himself after the muse struck him four years ago. He's also rewritten some nursery rhymes: In one, Jack and Jill and the hill and the pail of water all sue each other. There's also "The House That Crack Built," and the tinfoil-on-teeth "Baa Baa AIDS Sheep," which does not appear in "A Glass Half Full," but which Dennis read in front of the RSC.
Dennis' poems always rhyme.
Tom Wolfe, who compares Dennis' work to Rudyard Kipling's on the jacket of "A Glass Half Full," and attended the RSC reading, acknowledged that Kipling's poems are not regarded with fondness by the poetic establishment. "But he wrote really good stuff, and of course above all Kipling realized the power of rhyme and meter," said Wolfe.
"A hundred years ago if you had tried to write free verse people would have looked at you and said, 'What the hell do you think you're doing?'" said Dennis. "And now the shoe is on the other foot. Now if you write long quatrains or pantoums, you're the idiot." But, Dennis argued, there is some question as to where the idiocy lies. "Free verse has presided over a monstrous decline in the interest in poetry ... And yet as soon as a guy writes a book based entirely on those [classical] forms, people say, 'Who the hell does this guy think he is? This guy is just a rich idiot.' Maybe they're right. But not, apparently, to thousands and thousands of people who read this book and write to me."
Dennis is known for his explosive temper -- just ask the security guards in the Dennis Publishing building, who pursed their lips and shook their heads in warning when I told them who I was there to meet. But his rumpled, lumpy look diminishes the fear factor. Then there's the fact that while describing a recent reading in Detroit, where he claims two luscious young bawds appeared backstage and started fooling around, he said, "I did enjoy it, but I think I knew in my heart of hearts that nothing was going to happen. They were just pretending this was a big rock 'n' roll tour."
Dennis also said that overcoming his crack addiction has left him few vices save smokes and wine. "I've always been attracted to walking on the edge of the pond on the ice," he said. Now, he claimed, his precarious ice walks come at moments like the New York reading. "Going onstage with these hugely professional actors and doing all that kind of stuff -- I get very, very nervous, because I am outclassed and outgunned. I am not used to being in a room of any kind being outclassed and outgunned." Not exactly the kind of danger once provided by the crack pipe, I protested. "No, they are different kinds of discomfort," he acknowledged with a smile.
Still, Dennis hasn't exactly lost his edge. This is not a guy you'd want to compare sexual track records with -- or, even in these, his 12-step days -- attempt to drink under the table. But he sure seems to have begun the fade into baby boomer fuzziness. Felix the Cat is becoming Felix the pussycat. He's still making mass-marketed nubile skin available front and center on newsstands. But he's also taken up softer projects -- like the poetry, yes, and the huge forest he's planting in Britain, and the Garden of Heroes at his home in Warwickshire, which includes sculptures of Bob Dylan, Dorothy Parker and Dennis himself. It's as though whatever was dangerous, fractious and maverick about him has started to melt and blur slightly.
It is no wonder that Dennis is so distressed by my suggestion that his poetry is sentimental. Back in the conference room, when he defied me to name a poem in "A Glass Half Full" that exhibited the sentimentalism he so clearly loathed, I looked at my notes and told him that "A Silent Prayer..." had been the one that had prompted my question.
For books, old dogs, and hissing logs, For letters left a week; For bells not rung, for hymns unsung, For mice that softly Squeak; For dumbstruck snow and tears that flow In silence down a cheek.
"Mmm," said Dennis, thinking hard. "Well, I would say that that is the one poem in the book that tips furthest toward falling over the cliff of sentiment into the abyss of sentimentality. I think I'd accept that as criticism."
