Evening with Poetry by Carol Ann Duffy and Ana Makuc

Tuesday, 4 March 2025 at 6:30 pm

Literary event

Project Room SCCA-Ljubljana,

Metelkova 6,

1000 Ljubljana

Free entry, we will be accepting voluntary contributions

Evening with Poetry by Carol Ann Duffy and Ana Makuc

Cordially invited to a poetry evening on the occasion of the publication of two poetry collections by Sophia Publishing House – namely, I Smuggle Watermelons by Ana Makuc and The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy (translated into Slovene by Ana Makuc, who also wrote the accompanying study to the book). The conversation with the author and translator will be moderated by activist Eva Gračanin in a relaxed, informal and sisterly atmosphere.

Ana Makuc‘ second poetry collection entitled I Smuggle Watermelons (Sophia, 2024), is, like her début, Roland Bathers’ Lover, written mostly in the form of a dramatic monologue, thus giving voice to the unheard, the invisible, the oppressed, the exploited in society. The collection questions motherhood, female body and violence from a feminist perspective, parallels border of the female body and borders of the state (and, in this way, equates the relationship of white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy to territory and women’s bodies – hence the title of the collection), and thematises the liminal, interim, fluid, split subjectivities that are systemically pushed into this position. The author expresses her social critique through the mask or psychograms, a critique of institutional violence, especially against women’s bodies and refugees/migrants, which permeates all pores of private lives: domestic violence, sexual violence, the heteronormative nuclear family, women’s unpaid and invisible reproductive (household and caring) work, curtailment of reproductive rights, European anti-migrant policies, the objectification and sexualisation of women, the attitude of the medical establishment towards women’s (pregnant) bodies. The very poetic form or a sub-genre of poetry – the dramatic monologue – which has a long female writing tradition (it was invented by Victorian poets) empowers the speakers: these are not victims, but survivors, these are not objects, but subjects, these are not human trash, but persons, people with specific life circumstances.

In her poetry collection entitled The World’s Wife (Picador, 2024, 1999), Carol Ann Duffy, in thirty poems with thirty female speakers, gives to voice to those women who, as the saying goes, stand behind every ‘great’ man – whether real, historically attested, or fictional, mythological and biblical – so that we can see these men, such as Freud, Darwin, Orpheus, Odysseus, Faust, from the perspective of the bedroom, kitchen and bathroom, through the experiences of their wives, lovers and sisters. She does all this in a distinctly accessible, witty, humorous, playful, vivacious and at times offensive (satirical, parodic) way, and, first and foremost, in the form of the dramatic monologue, as this is the only poetry collection by Carol Ann Duffy written entirely in this form, although the dramatic monologue often appears in her other collections as well. In the collection, Duffy aims to highlight how women have generally been ignored at best and silenced at worst throughout the centuries. This silencing is so profound that it is no wonder that the collection includes characters from myths and fairy tales. These are archetypal figures whose psychological impact – in the form of the collective unconscious – is remarkable. She enters into a dialogue with that aspect of Western ideology, which – in the languages of philosophy, science, art and religion – has reduced women to animality, intellectual inferiority, passivity and dependence. Thus, she draws attention to the cultural and social consequences of this legacy, which favoured the narrative of the ‘world’s husband’ for far too long. Moreover, both in terms of structure and content, the poetry collection The World’s Wife is concerned with the female literary tradition, with the search for a voice as a woman, in relation to female subjectivity, with the question of what is ‘woman’, with the search for a more liberating vision of ‘femininity’.

Carol Ann Duffy (1955) in a Scottish poet, playwright, children’s writer and professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University in Great Britain, by education a Bachelor of Philosophy. She was named Poet Laureate of Great Britain in 2009, and was the first woman to receive the title. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Standing Female Nude (1985), Selling Manhattan (1987), Meantime (1993) and Rapture (2005), and the recipient of numerous literary prizes for her poetry. She is one of Britain’s most popular and prolific poets. Her poetry is written in accessible language, as she says that she ‘likes to use simple words in a complex way’

Ana Makuc (1982) is a Slovene poet, translator and activist. After studying Comparative Literature and Literary Theory and English Language and Literature at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana, she completed her PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Lancaster in the UK. Between the years 2014 and 2019, she was a co-creator of the International Feminist and Queer Festival Red Dawns. In 2016, she received the Veronika Award for the best poetry collection of the year for her début Roland Barthes’ Lover (2015, KUD Apokalipsa). In 2022, her translation of bell hooks’ work entitled Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics was published by Sophia Publishing House, and in 2024 two collections of poetry, which will be presented at the event. She has also published poetry, translations of fiction and nonfiction, and scholarly articles in the field of feminist literary studies in numerous journals and monographs.

Eva Gračanin is an activist in the field of LGBT rights, feminism, antimilitarism and anti-colonialism, and Palestinian women’s rights. Her activist path began when she volunteered and raised consciousness about the rights of asylum seekers and refugees within Slovenian Philanthropy. She continued this path at Legebitra, where she developed a programme for LGBT young people, formed and implemented trainings on social acceptance of diverse sexual orientations, identities and expressions, participated in the editorial board of the Narobe magazine and edited the Narobe blog, worked intensively in the field of respect for the rights of transgender people and advocated for the rights of LGBT applicants for international protection – in this field she has been working with the Pride Parade Association for the last two years. She is currently most active in the Palestinian Rights Movement, having joined it in 2014. In this context and in the spirit of extending solidarity, she has also joined Sophia Publishing House, where she has translated several poems by Palestinian women poets from English for the magazine Borec, participated in evenings of Palestinian poetry readings, and designed and moderated Sophia symposia, most recently the closing event ‘It’s hard to know who you are when the boundaries of your body are not the boundaries of your skin’, with a discussion on the occasion of the publication of the poetry collection I Smuggle Watermelons.

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Info

Organization: 26th International Feminist and Queer Festival Red Dawns (KUD Mreža)

Coproduction/ co-organisation: Publishing house Sophia, Center for Contemporary Arts SCCA-Ljubljana

Proof-reading (in Slovene): Tanja Velagić

Graphic image design: Lenča Malec

Contacts for the media: Saša Nemec, rdece.zore@gmail.com

Translation (to English): Ana Makuc

Financial support: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, City of Ljubljana – Department of Culture

Donations