Vancouver’s Rodney DeCroo explores new depths in Fishing for Leviathan
The multitalented artist’s new poetry collection finds him extolling a few simple pleasures
Rodney DeCroo
“IF SELF-PITY and grandiosity were talents, Rodney DeCroo would be a household name.”
While that might read like the hot take of a smartass arts critic, it’s actually a snippet of one of DeCroo’s own poems, “My Self-Pity Is Bigger Than Yours”, from his latest collection, Fishing for Leviathan (Anvil Press).
“At my worst moments, it’s true,” DeCroo says when Stir reaches him by phone at the Truck Stop Cafe on Clark Drive. “I am full of self-pity sometimes, and I am exceedingly grandiose. I mean, I’m a fucking recovering alcoholic and drug addict. You know, alcoholics and addicts are some of the most self-centred, grandiose, delusional human beings you’ll ever meet.”
A recovering addict he may be, but DeCroo is far more than that. Poet, playwright, actor, singer-songwriter—he is all of these, and he even has a book of street photography in the works (due out from Anvil Press in fall 2024).
Much of the Pennsylvania-born Vancouverite’s artistic output draws from the experiences that shaped him, and he has taken his audiences to some bleak terrain, from a childhood lived in the shadow of an alcoholic ex-Marine with a violent temper to an adulthood spent grappling with his own unresolved rage and trauma.
If DeCroo has a self-deprecating streak, he seems to be suggesting, it serves to keep him from indulging in any untoward displays of self-mythologizing: “You could easily say, ‘Well, why do we want to hear all this stuff? There’s people who have had it way worse than you. Why do I have to sit down and hear these poems about this terrible event—or even this fantastic event? Why are you that important?’ It’s just to remind myself to keep it in perspective.
“My poetry and my songwriting and my plays—all of it is not necessarily the easiest material to absorb,” he admits. “And then there’s that part of my head that says, ‘You’re not important. Who gives a shit about what happened to you? Get over it, crybaby.’”
Emerging from the crucible of hellish life experiences with his body and mind more or less intact was not what made DeCroo into a compelling creator. Nor was it his battle to keep the hellhounds at bay with whatever substances were at hand. Hard-luck stories are, after all, only too common.
“If the content is what made it art, anybody down at Main and Hastings could write a book, right?” DeCroo observes. “They’d all be poets. Or they’d all be singer-songwriters.”
DeCroo’s skill lies in distilling lived truths into a few spare lines that pack an emotional wallop, and in his ability to frame things that are specific to him in such a way that they touch upon something universal.
“You do this weird dance; it’s about you, but it’s not about you,” he says. “Like, it’s about you, but you have to put it across in a way that other people can connect with it, see themselves in it even if they’ve never had that experience. That’s the art.”
DeCroo wrote all of the poems in Fishing for Leviathan within the last three years. That time frame includes the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when shops were shuttered, public gatherings forbidden, and meth-addled coyotes reigned over once-bustling city streets.
Like many of us, DeCroo spent much of that time in relative isolation.
“It gave me time to think about a different part of my life that I hadn’t written about as much,” he recalls. “I wrote a lot about my childhood in Pennsylvania and when we were in Northern B.C. But there’s patches of my 20s that I never really wrote about, like being down in the States again, in South Carolina and Florida. I’d never really written about those periods of my life that much, so it was nice to get some of that stuff out.”
DeCroo notes that he’s led a “chaotic and varied life” that has given him no shortage of material, but there are parts of it that he is no longer keen on continuing to probe.
In his 2019 solo theatre show, Didn’t Hurt, DeCroo explored his journey through post-traumatic stress disorder. Didn’t Hurt earned its creator some of the most effusive praise of his career, with critics hailing the piece as “heartbreaking and important” and DeCroo’s performance as “gut-wrenching”.
“I did that show—oh, my God—at least 70 times,” he says. “There’s been interest in me possibly revisiting that show and doing another tour. And there’s no fucking way in the world I want to do that show again. I did it, and it cost me something to get up and relive those traumatic events night after night after night. I’m in a different place now. My Facebook feed used to be a lot about PTSD. Now I seldom mention it.”
There are poems in Fishing for Leviathan that read like the work of a man still hacking through the weeds of his past. Then again, there are others that find DeCroo basking in the cool deliciousness of frozen cherries purchased at Super-Valu, or extolling the joys of leftovers.
Yes, leftovers; “each day they taste better”, he writes, because the flavours have had time to mature and mingle. By the same token, DeCroo virtually sings the praises of secondhand jackets and worn-in old guitars.
“Those are the things that have given weight and meaning and even joy to my life,” he says. “But that process, it mirrors my own development as a human being. I’m a late bloomer. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring shit out and surviving and getting help and recovering—and functioning as an artist is a big part of that process.
“Fortunately, I’ve been lucky that other people have been willing to come with me on that journey,” he concludes, “but it’s not been an overnight thing, that’s for sure.”
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