'Drunks talk trash, don't they?'

For the record, Felix Dennis says he didn't kill a man, as he claimed in a newspaper interview published earlier this year. The notorious magazine publisher and 101st richest person in the country, who is now a poet, says that he and his interviewer, Ginny Dougary, got very drunk, and he started talking rubbish, and made up a story about pushing a man over a cliff 25 years ago. They were so drunk, he says, that "Ginny was carried into the car. I know, because I helped my chauffeur. We were both completely plastered. Do drunks talk trash? Then you have the answer." He blames the wine, and thyroid medication. Dougary, meanwhile, has written that she "had more fun with [Dennis] than in almost any other interview".

I arrive at Dennis's compound in the Warwickshire countryside (he has several others, in New England, the Caribbean, and so on). It takes me a while to find him. He isn't in the main house, Dorsington Manor. Perhaps, I'm told, he is in Highfield, a nautically themed building on the estate. So I go to Highfield. Inside are, among other things, a swimming pool, a hot tub, and an aquarium.

But Dennis, it turns out, is not at Highfield; he is in "the garden of heroes", sitting in a converted barn. Outside the barn is an avenue of perhaps 40 bronze statues Dennis has commissioned: Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Charles Darwin, Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair, Einstein, Robert Crumb, Kipling and Shakespeare. Dennis, who embarks on a poetry-reading tour this week, sits inside the barn, at a sumptuous desk, reading proof copies of his latest work.

His hair is as wild as ever, but "the mortar and pestle of time", as he puts it in a poem, has turned it grey. He peers at me through half-glasses. I like his poetry. It is mostly about looking back at life and having regrets, a rich subject. The poems click along in a way reminiscent of AE Housman or Kipling. Dennis finds himself contemplating "the years of brag and theft/ The dreary, squalid years when might made right/ This mercenary bounty all that's left."

It has, as he puts it, "certainly been an extraordinary life so far". Dennis grew up, relatively poor, in south-west London. He left school at 15, went to art college, dropped out, worked on the underground magazine Oz, was famously tried for publishing obscene material (including a collage featuring Rupert Bear's head on a Robert Crumb cartoon), and briefly went to prison. He then became, in turn, a magazine publisher, a multi-millionaire, a crack addict, and finally a poet.

"I am absolutely convinced," he says, "that my life was redeemed by poetry. Yes, it's true I'd given up narcotics - but I might have gone back. I would always have been tempted to go back and do more stupid things. And this passion for poetry became so absorbing that I didn't have enough time to go on wrecking my life."

He started writing poetry eight years ago, after an illness. Being a crack addict nearly killed him. Before that, being a multi-millionaire had pretty much killed him spiritually. It is, he admits, a problem he still struggles with. But his life got seriously out of hand in the 1990s. "You cannot be seeking yourself when you're making money," he says. "Because the very process of making money ensures you will create a false identity, a carapace, with which to deflect the many rocks and bullets that will be aimed at you. And if you don't create that carapace, then you will rapidly fall off a cliff, which I just about did anyway. So the very making of money is, in the end, a miserable business."

In 2006, Dennis wrote a book called How to Get Rich, one of the best books about money I've ever read. In it, he tells you that you won't get rich unless you're obsessed with being rich and, in any case, the money won't make you happy - it will make you neurotic. "You will," he writes, "be too busy keeping the sea from washing away the sand you have spent so long collecting at such terrible cost to your health and your sanity and your relationships. It is always thus. There is no escape."

People say that Dennis's own drive to get rich originates from the Oz trial, when the judge, Lord Justice Argyle, gave him a shorter sentence than the other two defendants, Richard Neville and Jim Anderson, saying that he appeared to be "very much less intelligent". But he was always a driven, spiky individual. He says: "I think I was a pretty unpleasant little shit. Especially after the Oz trial. But even before the Oz trial. We lost the Oz trial because we didn't have enough money. There's no question about it. And I wasn't having that happen again." In a poem called Old Bailey, he writes: "In a world where the rules are clear:/ That only the rich have wings,/ And the one beast all such bastards fear/ Is coin, and the power it brings.'

He had a tough childhood. His father - "my biological father", as he puts it - left for Australia when he was two, hoping the rest of the family would follow. But they didn't. Dennis says he doesn't want to know why, because you can never get to the bottom of these things. So he must have been growing his carapace from an early age. He also tells me that he was small as a boy, and found popularity by mocking teachers. "By using your mouth, you can do what your muscles can't," he says.

Every so often, he pours a tiny bit of Chablis into his glass, and tops it up with water. He's a restrained tippler these days. Anyway, the reason he left home, he says, is that his mother remarried: "I grew up as the alpha male. Then this man comes. I had to get out. I was interfering with their marriage."

So he moved into a bedsit at the age of 15. It was the early 60s. Girls, he says, were not a problem: he was the only 15-year-old with his own room, even though the loo was down the hall. He got work as a sign-painter, went to art school in Harrow, dropped out, and became a window-dresser. For a time, he thought he was going to be a singer. Later, he published Bruce Lee fanzines, and then built an empire out of magazines ranging from Mac User to Viz, Fortean Times and The Week.

He says one of his rivals once said: "Dennis has only got one talent, and that is that he knows exactly what people want five minutes before they know they want it. He knew they were going to want it and he produced it." Execution, as he says in his book about getting rich, is the key.

"I have an over-attachment to precision," he says, "which is why I've sold more magazines than any man alive." I can see Dennis's problem. Perhaps he thought that selling more magazines than any man alive would make him happy. But it didn't: it made him rich - and the whole process gave him a thick skin, or rather a thicker skin than he already had. Pretty soon, like a surprising number of rich people, he became self-destructive. There is no satisfying end product, he says, of the money-making process. "If I've created Maxim, and sold Maxim, and I'm 100 million quid richer, it's over, it's finished. There is no over or finished for a person who writes a novel, or poetry. No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it. Whereas monstrous amounts of wealth lead only in one direction. They can only lead to the degradation, to whatever degree, of the person involved. No one is a better person for having a large sum of money at their disposal. No one!"

Dennis looks at me through the tops of his half-glasses. "And you cannot get the time back that you spent making the money!" Or, as he puts it in a poem: "The gods have shown me favour/ (If any gods there be)/ Yet were my nature braver/ I might dispute the fee."

He tells me about the crack years. "Let's say," he says, "that you've made a huge sum of money, and you're spending your time with all these beautiful ladies of the night, taking vast quantities of crack cocaine - of the highest quality, by the way - and having a fantastic time. But do you know what? You do regret it. And I don't regret any book I've read. I don't regret any great painting I ever looked at. I don't regret any wonderful piece of music I ever heard."

Later, he gives a performance, in a marquee in a field on his land. The wine, which is good quality, is free, as it will be throughout the rest of his poetry tour, which he has titled Did I Mention the Free Wine? He stands on a stage, in a mustard waistcoat, and recites his poems, with their echoes of Kipling and Housman. There is generous applause from the audience, made up of friends, media people, and the odd upmarket celebrity such as Clive Anderson. Still, I feel for him. He got rich, which ruined him, but this in turn gave him a reservoir of regret from which to draw his poetry. He was, as he puts it, "As mad as any warring king/ Who builds himself a cage to call a throne."

And here he is, in his cage, trying to redeem himself.

· Felix Dennis's Homeless in My Heart is published by Ebury Press at £12.99. The Did I Mention the Free Wine? tour runs until October 21. Details: www.felixdennis.com