The following interview is part two of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).
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Six Bottles of Wine - Rodney DeCroo
I haven’t washed the dishes for over a week.
The sink and counter a precarious pile
of dirty pots, plates, bowls and glasses.
The whole mess on the verge of slippage,
of shattering into mundane but dangerous pieces.
I haven’t bathed in five days or brushed
my teeth. I can barely stand the sight or smell
of myself. I am a riot of self-pity in a filthy apartment.
And yes, yes, I’ve been drinking. I’m gloriously,
hideously drunk. I’ve been reading poetry
out loud, shouting through walls
at my neighbours. Every night the landlord pounds
on my door, tells me to shut up. I will
have to pay for my behaviors with sickness,
debt and shame. But I have six bottles of wine
before I have to remember that she is dead.
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Rodney DeCroo is the author of two previous books of poetry, Allegheny, BC and Next Door to the Butcher Shop. His poems have been published in Canadian publications such as subTerrain, Geist, Event, BC Bookworld, The Vancouver Province, Discorder Magazine, and The Georgia Straight, among others. His poetry has appeared in Beyond Forgetting, an anthology celebrating the work and life of legendary Canadian poet Al Purdy, and as part of BC’s Poetry in Transit. He has appeared on CBC to read his poems and is also a well-known, touring singer-songwriter with eight albums to his credit. His solo plays Stupid Boy in an Ugly Town and Didn’t Hurt have toured across Canada and the US. In 2019, Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s National Writing Centre, awarded him an International Poet in Residency.
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Rob Taylor: Near the end of Fishing for Leviathan you write about the poets (Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, Al Purdy, John Keats) who provided the “thinnest thread of light” in some of the darkest periods of your life. In those times, you were also sustained by writing your own “wonderful, worthless poems.” Where do you think you’d be today without poetry’s thread of light? From that perspective, are the poems really “worthless”?
Rodney DeCroo: I was seventeen years old when I encountered poetry in a high school English class. I’d only recently arrived from Pittsburgh to live with my father in Surrey, B.C. He was the manager of the infamous Newton Inn and wasn’t around much. I spent most of my time pilfering from my father’s considerable cache of drugs and getting high, so I made it to school maybe three out of five days a week. No one at school seemed to notice or care and I was good with that. My English teacher—I can’t remember his name—didn’t like me much. On one of the rare days I attended class he was teaching T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men.” I had no idea what was going on. I knew nothing about poetry. He kept asking me to explain for the class what various lines of the poem meant. I felt humiliated by him and whatever this indecipherable fucking thing poetry was.
A year later my father moved us to Cranbrook and I had to take an English literature course taught by a man named Mr. Fossey. The first poem he taught was Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and that was it. He talked about the poem in the context of Keats’ life when he wrote it and I was hooked. I didn’t necessarily understand the poem, but I loved the sounds and it made me feel something I could relate to even if I couldn’t articulate it. I kept repeating lines from the poem to myself. After school that day I rushed back to my room in the Tudor House Hotel (my father was the manager so we lived there). I grabbed some paper and a pen from the front desk and started writing poems. They were horrible, unintentional parodies of the poems I was reading at school but they were pure magic to me. I’d nothing going on in my life. I’d drink alone almost nightly in my room and/or get high depending on what I could get my hands on. My dad didn’t care what I was doing as long as I wasn’t causing trouble in the hotel, and it wasn’t too hard getting booze or dope surrounded by drunks and addicts. My father ignored me and I had no friends. So I’d lock myself in my room, get wasted and write poems.
When I dropped out of high school and ran off to Vancouver—even when I lived on the streets—I carried around an old battered briefcase filled with pages of my poetry. I used to give free poetry readings on the bus for my fellow commuters. One time a man stood up on the #14 Hastings Street bus to applaud and I was thrilled. Hey, an appreciative audience is an appreciative audience! I’ll take it! And throughout that time I was reading all the poets you mentioned. They all excited me in different ways. At the time Bukowski spoke to me the most because his poems were so accessible and used language that was similar to the way I spoke. When I started reading his poetry I felt like hey, maybe I can actually do this and I began to try and write the way I spoke.
Poetry gave my life purpose— I was part of something fine— and that made me feel like I mattered in some way. I was a poet, goddamn it! By my late teens when I dropped out of school I was already a drunk and a drug addict. I lived on and off the streets and worked horrible, humiliating jobs and got fired regularly. I got into fights and often got my ass kicked. I spent many nights in the Vancouver drunk tank. So while my poems were awful they kept me going. I was betting everything on them. Now, I think differently about those poems. Sure, they weren’t much but learning to write poetry is a long, unbroken process that is never finished. The poems I write now contain the DNA of those early poems no matter how awful they were. So yeah, my wonderful, worthless poems. Without them I wouldn’t be here.
RT: I see two distinct styles in the poems in Fishing for Leviathan. One is Purdy-esque story-poems, akin to what you just described, which flow with a natural speaking rhythm. The other style is these more tightly-packed, non-linear, associatively linked poems written in couplets, reminiscent of John Thompson’s ghazals in Stilt Jack. The content of the poems in these two styles is distinct, too, with the subject matter of the story-poems more raw, ala Bukowski, and the others more abstract and lyrical, seemingly removed from the harshness of your early years. How did you come to write in these two modes? Do you see a clear distinction between them, or do you move between them more fluidly?
RD: I’ve always had these two approaches both as a poet and songwriter. As a young poet I found it difficult to control the non-linear poems. I didn’t trust them because I didn’t have a process, or enough craft, to work with that material. When I did write those poems they tended to be more like automatic writing that went on and on and on. Song lyrics allowed me to experiment more because a song doesn’t necessarily live or die on its lyrics. You can get away with things lyrically in a song that you never could in a poem.
As I grew as a poet, and as I got used to working associatively with song lyrics, I became more confident in my ability to shape non-linear content into what I feel are cohesive poems. Honestly, after writing a bunch of narrative poems I get bored and switch gears. I relish the freedom and magic non-linear material offers, and yet the storyteller is always there. I think that’s part of how I’ve learned to control those poems. I tend to write in bursts. I’ll write several of those poems over a couple weeks, but I’ll start craving solid ground to stand on—and so, back to the narrative poems. I can’t prove it but I think these styles are in dialogue with each other. You know, like how our dream lives and our waking lives are in conversation. And I think the satisfying change in rhythm those poems provide me as a poet do a similar thing for the reader.
RT: Steven Heighton referred to his job as a poet as being a “stenographer to my nightmind,” and told me that he hoped engaging with his dream mind allowed his poems to move “more vulnerably and associatively.” That seems to be the case for you, too. How do you think your non-linear poems have influenced the nature of your narrative poems? Do you sense that how you tell your life’s stories in poems has changed over the years?
RD: As a multi-disciplinary artist I find that when I work in one medium— say, street photography, for example—that it effects how I approach my poetry when I’m back on the page, whether it’s in my writing process, or the poem’s content or form. The changes are often subtle, just small shifts in perspective, but sometimes they’re big. Writing song lyrics helped me to start writing the non-linear poems which I write a lot of now. I’d say writing non-linear poems have made me less rigid in how I approach narrative poems that tell my life’s stories. I used to feel that I had to stick to the facts—to what actually happened—but I’m not writing an autobiography, I’m writing poetry. I realized that, for me at least, having to adhere to the facts limited where the language could take the poem. I was limiting my poetic imagination. I’m more interested in getting at the emotional truths below the details. What I called the “facts” of a story added up to a story I was already telling myself. If I wanted to get at something deeper I needed to allow new ideas into the poems. Also, we’re always trying to say in poems what is unsayable within ourselves—otherwise we wouldn’t need poems. My hope is that some of the more associative movements of the non-linear poems can begin to work into the narrative poems to allow for deeper, unseen currents to move within/ under the narrative.
RT: Wonderfully put: poems as existing to say something beyond the story we tell ourselves; to say what we couldn’t otherwise say. Perhaps connected to these realizations, you dedicate Fishing for Leviathan to acclaimed BC poet Russell Thornton, “for helping me stand up to myself and write better poems.” Could you talk a little about the role Russell has played in your development as a poet?
RD: I initially met Russell because he invited me to appear on a poetry show he hosted on Vancouver Co-op Radio. I’d heard him read on a couple of occasions and admired him as a poet. With the exception of Al Purdy, my few interactions with older, accomplished poets hadn’t gone well. I’d an enormous chip on my shoulder and was deeply insecure, so I was pretty belligerent. I was a high school dropout, I’d no publishing history except in zines and underground publications, and outside of the local underground scene I was unknown as a poet. The truth was my poetry didn’t merit much attention then and—when I was willing to be honest— I knew that, but I didn’t know what to do. I was in my early forties and still writing like a young, unrealized poet. I was getting a little long in the tooth for that and was deeply afraid that maybe I wasn’t capable of more. I was experiencing some success as a singer-songwriter, I was touring regularly with my band and was with a label that enthusiastically supported my releases, but poetry was my first love.
I was surprised by how gracious Russell was when I came on his show. He asked questions about my poems that made me feel like a peer. He was coming from a place as a much more accomplished poet, but he didn’t talk down to me. I liked him immediately. He easily cut through all my usual defenses. Russell and I have some stuff in common in our backgrounds and he recognized that in me. We slowly became friends and I started sending him my poems. He would comment on them kindly. He pointed out what he liked, but he also was direct—without putting me down—about what he felt wasn’t working. I was able to listen because of his approach and gradually started internalizing the things he taught me about craft. Just being aware of basic elements of craft forced me to dig deeper, and my poems quickly showed improvement.
He also taught me—I feel this is the most valuable thing I learned from him—to trust the language. He would say it to me over and over again. He’d show me where my poems broke down. I’d ask him what he thought they needed and he’d say, I don’t know, it’s your poem, trust the language, Rodney, it knows. He encouraged me to go inwards and to find my poethood which is about—in my opinion—listening for the language to speak and letting it guide me. So when I found myself resorting to clichés or trying to force an ending I learned how to sit patiently and wait for the language to show me the way through the seeming impasses I’d reach in poems. I could hear it and feel it. It was visceral. When I lost that feeling I knew to stop and try later. Previously, I’d had few tools or the confidence to write fully realized poems. I truly believe that without Russell’s help I wouldn’t have made the transition from an undisciplined young poet to a reasonably competent poet.
RT: Is that what you mean by “standing up to yourself”? That discipline to listen to the language and wait?
RD: Yeah, that was part of it. Giving up the bad habits I’d developed as a poet which had to do with my ego and getting down to the real business of writing poems, which requires humility. But also, I was a recovering drunk and addict dealing with untreated C-PTSD. I was very damaged and very reactive. Without alcohol or drugs to numb what I was feeling I simply couldn’t cope. I reached a point, in sobriety, where I had a total breakdown. I abandoned a cross-Canada tour with my band and hid in Montreal with a friend who was a writer. He let me stay at his place rent free. It was an incredible act of kindness by my friend. All I did was go to 12th step meetings a couple times a day (where I made many friends), walk around Montreal for hours, and talk to Russell on the phone. I don’t know where he found the patience. He helped me recognize and stand up to a lot of the self-destructive behaviors that were ruining my life and hurting my friends and colleagues. I eventually got professional help, but in the initial stages Russell provided understanding support. He also challenged me. He said to me once, “We have to stand up to ourselves, Rodney,” and that became a kind of mantra for me. And of course the personal changes I went through improved my poetry.
RT: Russell sounds like as good a friend as he is a poet, which is really saying something. That patience in waiting for a poem’s language to explain itself to you seems echoed in a few poems in Fishing for Leviathan. In “The Buck” you write about a boy waiting in a hunting stand for hours until “the silence… is not an absence but a living / presence both outside and in.” Were you consciously drawing parallels there between hunting and your evolving writing practice? What role has welcoming silence played in your development as a writer?
RD: “The Buck” is based on a strange experience I had as a teenage boy hunting for the first time by myself. I was in the woods for several hours and it had snowed the night before so everything was covered in fresh snow. I slipped into some sort of trance or something and had an encounter with a buck that seemed—for lack of a better term—mystical. The buck was gone before I realized I hadn’t raised my rifle. It didn’t even occur to me. The embodied silence I talk about brings me a deep sense of wholeness and connection to something much larger than me. It’s fleeting of course. It’s why I write poems. If a poem I write is successful there’s a silence that resonates after the final line. It’s a distant echo of that silence I felt in the woods that day. I mostly experience that sensation both as a poet and a reader of poems and sometimes— though rarely—while performing certain songs for an audience: it’s like there’s a silence underneath the song that holds both my performance and the attention of the audience. It becomes so intimate that it’s impossible for me to describe. If I was able to experience that silence without poetry—who knows—maybe I wouldn’t bother to write anymore. I think I write poems out of the various conflicts within myself. Maybe in those brief moments at the end of poems I experience a truce between internal adversaries, and it results in what feels like silence.
RT: The silence being the reason you write the poems—I’ve never heard it put quite that way, but it feels very accurate to me. Thank you. And the idea of a truce between adversaries, too. A central theme of Fishing for Leviathan is working to break generational trauma.
In “Tying the Centuries Together Like a Funeral Wreath,” you write,
I want a eulogy that says
it stopped with me, this line of broken labourers,
shattered soldiers, depressed housewives,
schizophrenics, suicides, alcoholics, criminals…
Later, you close the book with a loving embrace between speaker and child, and so many of those destructive cycles appear broken. Yet Fishing for Leviathan is also filled with declarations of personal and career disappointment, such as:
My therapist says given my childhood
I’m lucky to be alive. Maybe next life let’s set
the bar a little higher.
I’m curious how you define “success” in your life and writing. Are you able to appreciate your accomplishments in stopping some destructive multi-generational patterns?
RD: I think we all deal with patterns of multi-generational trauma to varying degrees. Hell, life is traumatic at times for nearly everyone. I think sometimes higher social class status and the stability that comes with that can take the edges off it, but it’s still there. Unfortunately, because of the poverty, violence and neglect I experienced as a daily reality during my childhood I have struggled most of my life to simply survive. That looked like years of extremely self-destructive behaviors, such as addiction. I was a petty thief, highly dishonest and violent at times. I’m a high school dropout and so on. I’ve never had any financial security or a professional career. This isn’t about self-pity, it’s just a statement of facts. I’ve had some amazing opportunities come to me—like a budding successful career as a singer-songwriter—that I self-sabotaged in very dramatic and public ways.
I’ve been learning one day at a time for the last fifteen years to manage C-PTSD flashbacks effectively. I’ve been free from alcohol and other drugs for 23 years. But I don’t think the destructive cycles are ever fully broken—I’ll always have C-PTSD and I’ll always be an alcoholic / addict—but I can have a daily reprieve contingent on my willingness to be accountable to myself and those around me. I have to engage in regular self-care, to become more aware of my negative patterns of thought/ behavior conditioned by years of childhood trauma and make different choices. I have to be willing to stand up to myself or, as an old 12th step sponsor used to say, “Strive to have an asshole free day, Rodney.” The same patterns conditioned by years of trauma still present themselves to me, but I make different choices now and as a consequence my life looks much different. That changes how I feel about myself, which strengthens my desire to keep doing the work. The child I refer to in the poems, Lucy, isn’t my daughter, so I can’t say I’ve broken a multi-generational cycle of trauma, but I’m close to her and being a care-giver and an “uncle” (her term) for over a decade has changed me in ways that helped me break through some of my destructive tendencies. At the risk of sounding cheesy, I feel like I’m living now, rather than just careening through the wreckage that I was creating.
RT: Not cheesy at all, and it should be a point of pride. How about when it comes to career success, now that you have this third book of poems now out in the world (enthusiastically praised by Russell Thornton and Claire Askew, no less!)? Is “success” achievable for you, or will you inch your bar higher with every accomplishment?
RD: I don’t know. I’d like to have some stability that comes from a certain level of financial and professional success, but those things aren’t given out for free, they’re earned. I am fifty-six. I wasted a huge portion of my life, so that may not be a reality for me. Who knows, maybe my artistic pursuits will help eventually in that regard, but it’s highly unlikely. I am thrilled however to have published books of poetry that poets I admire like Russell Thornton and Claire Askew have said good things about. The same goes with my other work. And in the moment—when I’m performing and connected to an audience—well, that’s a special thing that I don’t think everybody gets to experience. But the truth is, I was imprinted as a small child with messages that I didn’t matter, that I was unlovable, that I was a piece of shit, and so on. And I’m not talking about not getting held enough. I’m talking about stuff that people go to jail for now. If I could ever silence those voices that would be something. I don’t think writing any number of books of poetry or playing any number of shows or getting accolades will ever do that for me though. I’ve had some small successes and found that they are fleeting and don’t impact those feelings much for long.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that folks like Silas White at Nightwood Editions, and Brian Kaufman and Karen Green at Anvil Press, have been willing to publish my books. I wouldn’t trade that away for anything, and I hope to publish more. But I suspect that no matter what I achieve as an artist, I will always be inching that bar higher as you suggest, because that’s not going to solve the core dilemma, is it? The irony is that the conflict I have with how I feel about myself in my core is the source of my poetry, and that same thing drives my desire to be recognized, which is ultimately not going to resolve the problem. But I don’t think it’s about resolving the problem, I think maybe it’s about learning to live with it.
RT: In “My Self-Pity Is Bigger Than Yours” you write “Oh someday poetry / is gonna explode out of me like a truck / full of fireworks on the darkest night / of the year.” You wrote this in your third book—you’ve already exploded quite a bit! What do you aspire to in your poetry that hasn’t yet exploded out?
RD: Well, thanks, but my inner critics disagree! They demand more exploding! But really, I don’t think I’m any different from most artists whether you’re a poet, a mime or a painter. I think we’re always persuading ourselves that someday we’re going to paint our masterpiece! I read this a while ago in a Wikipedia post about Dylan’s song “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and it made so much sense to me:
Douglas Brinkley, while interviewing Dylan for the New York Times in 2020, noted that “When I Paint My Masterpiece” was a song that had grown on him over the years and asked Dylan why he had brought it “back to the forefront of recent concerts”. Dylan replied, “It’s grown on me as well. I think this song has something to do with the classical world, something that’s out of reach. Someplace you’d like to be beyond your experience. Something that is so supreme and first rate that you could never come back down from the mountain. That you’ve achieved the unthinkable. That’s what the song tries to say, and you’d have to put it in that context. In saying that though, even if you do paint your masterpiece, what will you do then? Well, obviously you have to paint another masterpiece”.
RT: Oh, I love that song. You’re in good company with Bob, eh? Ever dissatisfied poets/singer-songwriters. You’ve touched a bit earlier on the influence of your music on your poetry, but I was wondering if you could expand on that a bit before we wrap up. How has your work in other fields influenced your approach to the writing and performance of poetry?
RD: At the heart of everything I do, I’m a poet. Through my late teens and early twenties I only wrote poetry. A little past my mid-twenties I started memorizing and performing my poems at poetry readings. In the mid-nineties Vancouver had a thriving underground poetry scene. There were readings nearly every night in cafes across the city, but mostly in East Vancouver. I became part of a poetry performance group called the Ducktape Platypus Poets Coalition. Honestly, we weren’t very good, but I guess we were entertaining because we had a local following. Bernie Radelfinger was part of that group and had been in the band Bob’s Your Uncle. He helped me write songs using lines from my poems and we’d perform them together with Bernie playing guitar. When I was in my early thirties I taught myself to play guitar and a couple years later I put out my first album and began touring.
RT: What about playwriting? I understand that a play you wrote will be performed later this year?
RD: Yes, my first two act play (which I co-wrote with Samantha Pawliuk and David Bloom) will open the fall season at The Shadbolt Centre.
I mostly write one-person plays which are long monologues, really, and they’re a form of dramatic speech that works partially through the use of poetic devices to a moment of personal discovery / transformation, which isn’t a far cry from the type of poems I write, I guess. So I think they’re extensions of my being a poet.
RT: Do you have any other artistic “extensions” of your poetry?
RD: My latest obsession is street photography which I’ve been doing for four years now. Anvil Press commissioned a book of street photography from me that will be published in the fall of 2024. Like my poetry, my photography attempts to take a moment and freeze it. To make time stop. There’s something in that. And also my poems tend to—I hope—conjure strong images, and street photography is an attempt to capture a compelling image pulled from the chaos of the street.
RT: I can’t wait to see more of them in the book next year. It should be a nice companion piece to Fishing for Leviathan.
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