In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sadie Dupuis

What is the story behind your poem, “Most of Last Year and the Years Before It,” that appears in Volume 27?

I wrote this poem in March 2024, in response to Philadelphia mayor Cherelle Parker’s ongoing bungling of harm reduction in our city. Parker had announced budgetary cuts to needed services such as syringe exchange, and was refusing to allocate any portion of a very large opioid settlement the city received toward these lifesaving programs; she was interfering with our city’s long standing harm reduction collectives and their lifesaving work. It felt infuriating to watch this newly elected official—whose opponent I’d believed in and rallied behind—fumble these crucial services, despite decades of evidence backing these programs. Her choices were sure to kill people, and they have. In the past month alone, two Philadelphians have died in police custody as a direct result of the mayor’s carceral policies. 

I wanted to write about how protest can be rooted in memory and sentimentality, how negative emotional expressions can come from love and tenderness, how all of these feelings can comprise politics. 

There’s this repeating image of cobwebs, which I imagine as sticky memories. Where did this image come from?

Cobwebs, in this poem, serve as a few kinds of props: gross objects to be thrown, suspicious substances to try, intricate histories to share. Cobwebs are a way of making one’s presence known, of recognizing that you are tied to others’ lives and experiences. What differentiates cobwebs from spider webs is that cobwebs are abandoned. A cobweb implies the absence of a spider—a small, relatively harmless animal that inspires disproportionate fear in people. All a spider’s trying to do is build its home, hunt its food. Arachnophobia (like most phobias) is not rational, and sort of parallels the baffling way that city governments treat marginalized residents as frightening or disposable. I use cobwebs in this poem as a way of aligning the speaker with those who are wrongly feared, who are harmed by draconian policies that eradicate needed resources like SSPs.

There’s a musicality in this piece with the sensory details of noise. How does music influence your poetry?

I work in several creative mediums and do find they influence one another. I pick up on and pursue melodic or rhythmic threads in poems, and in line editing I like to consider how my lyrics can work as poems or as prose. I also make visual art which brings other perspectives to my poetry or songwriting. What kinds of colors do different timbres sound like? What emotions do the spatiality or architecture of a poem enhance? It’s all a balance of sensations. But in terms of communicating narrative in a poem, since I spend so much time working in and with audio, that is probably a sense I opt toward quicker. My mind’s ear is more active than my mind’s eye. 

The line, “When time makes anger loud” stood out to me. You have many of these phrases that mix the senses. How did you develop this sort of phrasing?

Time and volume are entwined in emotion. Years can numb a wound, or make its outrage more acute. In this poem, those concepts are tied to “Sunday,” the end of a week, which should or could be a day of rest. Sunday here is a place in which everyone is “smoking the bad kind of gossip”; the stanza is about community conversations, where perhaps every participant feels inflamed. It’s about rightful collective outrage over issues that matter. “Time” and “volume” are intervals used to measure music, but they also can speak to commitment to a cause. 

What themes does your work circle back to, if any?

Grief and harm reduction were major themes of my last book, Cry Perfume, which came out in 2022 but was written between 2016 – 2020. Several years later, I’m obviously still writing about that second theme, because it is so important, and because policy surrounding overdose prevention seems to be regressing, locally and nationally! Other themes I revisit include intersections of art, labor, technology, the body, and illness. 

What authors or texts inspire you? What are some of your favorite books?

I’m really terrible at just picking a couple things. These are some faves: Sylvia Plath, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Michael DeForge, Audre Lorde, Eve Babitz, Dorothea Lasky, Brenda Shaughnessy, Michelle Tea, Jaime Hernandez, Don Mee Choi, Simone White, Ariana Reines, Thomas Pynchon, Jenny Zhang, Chris Kraus, Fernando A. Flores, Danez Smith, Sawako Nakayasu, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary Ruefle, Federico García Lorca, Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, Kate Zambreno, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, CAConrad, Hoa Nguyen, Jorie Graham, June Jordan, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Kaveh Akbar, Melissa Broder, Tara Booth, Hanif Abdurraqib, David Berman, Ling Ma, Roberto Bolaño, Hiroko Oyamada, Samantha Hunt, Sheila Heti, Annie Ernaux, Sarah Gerard, Maggie Nelson… sorry!

If I were to pick some more recent loves, Johanna Hedva, Fady Joudah, and M.S. Coe are some of the best new-to-me writers I’ve read this year.

What are you currently writing or working on?

I shattered my elbow last June, which has been a very long and ongoing recovery, and which delayed a lot of writing and recording plans. That has eaten up a lot of my last year. But I’m currently focusing on tracking some long-postponed new songs for my solo project, which is called Sad13. I’m doing some light touring and sporadic festivals with Speedy Ortiz, which is always a fun excuse to see a lot of friends. I’m writing and editing some new poems, though a bit more slowly than in the past as computer use is still a bit restricted due to nerve injury from my accident. It’s been a lot more drafting by hand than in the past, which I find makes my poetic voice pretty different. And I’m getting or have gotten to be a conversation partner for some of my favorite writers’ Philly book tour appearances this year—Liz Pelly, Jeremy Gordon, Niko Stratis and a few more coming up! Interviewing other writers and musicians is one of the most inspiring things on my own work, so I always really look forward to these conversations.

Sadie Dupuis is the guitarist, songwriter, and singer of rock band Speedy Ortiz, as well as the producer and multi-instrumentalist behind pop project Sad13. Dupuis heads the record label Wax Nine, edits its poetry journal, and is a regular contributor to Spin, Tape Op, Talkhouse, and more. She holds an MFA in poetry from UMass Amherst, where she also taught writing. Mouthguard, her first book, was published in 2018 (Gramma); Cry Perfume, a second poetry collection, was released in 2022 (Black Ocean). She is an organizer with United Musicians and Allied Workers and its local UMAW Philly.