Maria Zoccola is a Tennessee-based poet whose new publication reimagines the mythological Helen of Troy, resituating her in the American South in the 1990s. Zoccola’s text weaves Homeric myth with the objects, rituals, and landmarks of 90s Americana that ground her protagonist in a setting that is as unexpected as it is uncannily familiar. The narrative that emerges from this collection of poetry challenges traditional notions about Helen’s character and opens up new avenues for reenvisioning the legendary women of Homeric epic. I spoke with Maria Zoccola over Zoom about her debut collection, Helen of Troy, 1993. The interview below is a transcript of our conversation.
How do the Iliad and the Odyssey tie into your vocation as a poet?
I’ve been a Greek mythology nerd ever since I was a young kid, which I thought was unique and special, but now that I’ve grown up and talked to other people, I’ve learned that the Greek mythology nerd little girl is a very common trope. There were millions of us running around different library branches. That’s how I spent my childhood, reading books of Greek mythology, obsessing over those stories, reading adaptations. In the early aughts there was a big wave of Greek mythology adaptation in fiction and cartoons. So, I was very familiar with the Odyssey and with the story of the Trojan War before I read the poems. I read the poems themselves in ninth grade English with Mrs. Bell, when we had about six weeks to read the Robert Fagles translation of both poems back-to-back. Mrs. Bell assigned excerpts, but I was so in love with the story and the language and the characters that I read the whole thing all the way through. I knew at the time that it was changing my life as I was reading it. That was my experience that I carry with me until today. I took Latin from the seventh through twelfth grades, I studied Classics in college, and that was my life.
Who is Helen to you, and has she changed throughout the elaboration of the collection?
I started writing poetry in a serious way in about 2017. I had taken a couple of poetry classes in college, and I had done spectacularly poorly in them. I wasn’t sure what I was doing at the time. I didn’t really understand poetry, to the chagrin of my professors. But when I really started taking it very seriously as a discipline in about 2017, some of the first pieces I started writing were pieces inspired by Greek mythology, by the Iliad and the Trojan War. By the time 2020 came around and the pandemic shut everything down, I started a project of writing persona poems in the voices of women from the Iliad set in specifically Bronze Age Greece. It was a distraction from everything else that was happening during the pandemic.
I struggled with Helen’s voice and with her as a character. Reading her story as a child, I never liked her very much as a character. She frustrated me deeply. I found her to be kind of undeserving of her larger fate. She grows up as Princess of Sparta. She is taken by Paris and becomes Princess of Troy. She rides out the whole Trojan War in safety and security behind the walls of Troy, and then at the end of the war is taken by her husband Menelaus back to Sparta, returned to her place as Queen of Sparta without any repercussions for this larger war, for this generation of men who fought and died in her name. I found the other women around her to be much more sympathetic figures, the ones who end their stories in the Trojan War slain or enslaved, or with other horrific fates. So, when I was writing those persona poems in voices of women from the Iliad, I never really touched Helen’s voice at all during that time.
About a year later, I kind of suddenly dove into her character. I grabbed my notebook and wrote seven Helen poems in a row, seemingly out of nowhere. This new voice that was not set in Bronze Age Greece, but in the very familiar 1990s Tennessee exploded onto my page. And I just kept writing. And the process of writing that book transformed my relationship with Helen as a character. It made me read parts of the Iliad that I had carried with me for so long in completely new and different ways. It revolutionized the way I understood Helen’s role in the war, Helen’s role as a character, even the lines Helen speaks in the Iliad. It was such a cool process that I’m very grateful for.
Is there something that you want people to understand about Helen that you feel gets misunderstood?
Definitely. I think that in a modern adaptation, Helen gets cast as the popular girl, the head cheerleader, most beautiful woman in the world, and that’s where the story stops for her. She’s not seen as someone with her own thoughts and plans and agency. And I think that’s because in the Iliad, she doesn’t have that much agency. She isn’t given a choice. She’s told to marry Menelaus. She becomes Queen of Sparta, but that role would not have come with a lot of power or social influence for her. She’s still a figurehead in a deeply patriarchal culture for which a powerful woman’s role is mostly serving wine and weaving tapestries. She’s taken by Paris across the sea to Troy where she’s installed as Princess of Sparta within a City State that hates her and reviles her as the cause of a war that’s ruining everyone’s lives. At the end of the war, she’s taken by her former husband Menelaus and put back on her throne. She’s not given in a choice of all of this. Even in the initial judgment of Paris when Aphrodite awards her as a prize in the beauty contest among immortals, she’s not given a choice whether she wants to be a prize. I think that modern interpretations of Helen as the “popular girl,” or the “mean head cheerleader” miss how very little power Helen has.
Helen only speaks about six times in the whole Iliad. She has six scenes in this whole poem that is basically about her. I started reading the places where Helen is allowed to talk in a completely new way. She is often very self-denigrating. She is often calling herself a bitch or saying she’s so horrible for all the things she’s done. As an adult reading that, I’m seeing how calculated these lines are. How she is being held in this place that hates her, trapped behind the walls among people who have every reason to murder her at night to stop the war. And the way that she’s speaking about herself is a way to keep herself safe, a way to hold on to what little power and influence she still has. It’s very sneaky, and the more I started approaching her character in that vein, the more obsessed I became with how she’s a survivor throughout the whole Iliad. I tried to carry some of those threads into Helen of Troy 1993, to keep you always guessing a little bit. Is she saying what she really thinks? Is she being sarcastic sometimes? Her focus on domesticity or how domesticity is trapping her, how much of that is real? How much of that is her playing a larger role in her own mind? Or for her people or for her community?
Where and when did you grow up, and which elements of your background lend themselves to mythopoesis?
I was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. I’ve spent most of my life here. I love Tennessee. I love the South. I lived about eight years in Georgia as well. The only time in my life I’ve lived outside of the South is when I got my graduate degree in England. This culture is what I know, it’s what I love. It’s my home, and I don’t think I fully understood how the rest of the world interacts with the South until I left the South for graduate school. Having lived within the South, everyone here understands to various degrees the complicated world that the South is: the different power imbalances that shape our culture, the way that resistance functions within the systematic oppression that we live in, the way that joy functions within our world. But leaving the South and learning that this complex understanding of this place is not universal at all was interesting to me, and really upsetting of course. Just hearing the way that people outside of the United States and people from other parts of the United States would talk about the South to me to my face was eye-opening. And as a result of that, I started considering the South and setting my work in the South more explicitly, not as a reaction to but more as a celebration of this place which I realized was not universally celebrated. I think that I belong here, I think that this version of Helen belongs here. It’s been cool to take a character who is mythologically celebrated, known, revered, and bring her to a world that I found mythological, that should be celebrated and should be revered. It seems a natural marriage to me, although I have had to think more deeply about that as I’m doing interviews for this book because that’s something I’m often asked. Why did you put Helen in the South? It seemed so obvious to me at the time, and I’ve had to think more deeply about the different strands that went into it in my own brain.
When did you begin to see Tennessee from the outside, and what was your reaction to it?
The number one thing that comes up over and over again is that the South is an oppressive and racist place, and we’d be better off if we took some scissors and cut it off of the United States and just floated it off into the Atlantic Ocean. It’s so interesting to me to hear that repeated without any kind of deeper analysis of how the South is a mirror of the larger United States as a whole, and how oppression and racism are deep evils that infect the entire country, both in overt and covert ways. It’s easy to have a specific place where you can say, “Oh, that only happens there,” without needing to look deeply into your own community and say, “This is happening here as well.” It’s always interesting to me to hear that narrative about the South without also hearing what to me is so obvious, which is the overwhelming amount of resistance and change-makers and revolutionary figures and groups who are actively working on a day-by-day basis to change those systems, to fight back against the cultures that are being held in place by a very small group in power that are keeping the rest of us down. To me, the South is the most revolutionary place in the entire United States. I see first-hand, I experience first-hand, I act first-hand within these networks of people who through non-profits and mutual aid funds are working daily to fight against every new law or group that is trying to push us down. When I hear news about the South, I think, oh I wonder what x, y, and z are going to do about that, and they’ve already put up a statement, they’ve already started their march. So, I wish that there was more recognition for the amount of work that’s being done in this part of the country, by the most incredible people I’ve ever met, to create the kind of South that is welcoming, and a great place for everyone to live.
Do you want to speak on the variation in poetic form in Helen of Troy, 1993, and what the combination of different poetic forms lends to the collection?
I had the best time working with different forms in writing this book. There are so many different forms because I was having a good time writing in different forms. I had a lot of fun with it. One form that I return to often in this book is the Golden Shovel, which was created by American poet Terrence Hayes traditionally using lines from Gwendolyn Brooks poems, but as it has evolved and grown, you can now create a Golden Shovel using any source material. And my source material was of course the Iliad, specifically the Robert Fagles translation. It was important to me to have the translation of the Ancient Greek, which is itself a translation of oral tradition, to have those lines in this incredibly modern and kind of iconoclastic version of the Iliad. To have what Homer wrote, what Fagles wrote as a jumping-off point for a modern form of translation. I had a lot of fun with that. I have some ekphrastic pieces in here as well. There’s this amazing French symbolist painter named Gustave Moreau who did an entire series of pieces inspired by the Trojan War; he has several Helen of Troy pieces that are so evocative and provide a completely new way of thinking about and looking at Helen and inspired several pieces in the collection.
We never really “see” your Helen, although we have brief glimpses of body parts and hair, etc. Was this a deliberate choice for a character that is famed for her appearance?
Yes, that was a deliberate choice. On the one hand, most of these poems are persona poems in the voice of Helen, and it can be a pretty tired trope to have a character look in the mirror and try to describe themselves. I didn’t want to do that, but there were moments where, as I was writing the poems, I was considering to myself, should I have Helen talk about her own appearance and how her appearance has impacted her life? There was even a moment where I wondered if I should make her beautiful or not. What if I made her think of herself as plain or not particularly beautiful? How would her life be different if she were not incredibly beautiful? And then I thought, well, maybe we just won’t have that thread in the book. This book has a lot of threads. Let’s maybe leave that one out. There was a poem I was working on where Helen is a child and she’s sitting with her mother at the bathroom sink, and she’s gotten herself dirty outside playing with her brothers in the woods, and her mother is cleaning her face and talking about her as a prize. I ended up not moving forward with that because I started thinking that there is something intentional and powerful about a book about the most beautiful woman in the world, where her beauty is not the major through-line of the book. So that was ultimately intentional, although it did take a lot of thinking and stopping and starting to get to that point.
Are there any other characters from Homeric epic that might hold your attention for the entirety of a full-length collection of poetry?
I secretly wish that I could do a book like this for all the women of Troy. I think that would be the greatest time in my life. I would be the happiest I’ve ever been if the next book could be Cassandra, and then Andromache, and then Iphigenia. I’ve been invested in these characters ever since I can remember, and for the longest time Helen was the one I cared about the least. I still care about all these other women so very much, and a lot of the men too. I grew up finding many of these women to be deeply sympathetic figures who took up a lot of my brain space. I think the story of Iphigenia, a young princess, the oldest daughter of Helen’s sister Clytemnestra who is told that she is going to marry Achilles and then at the marriage altar learns that Agamemnon has chosen her to be a human sacrifice to the goddess Artemis for wind to blow the fleet towards Troy. I could write ten collections about her alone. There’s an alternate story about Iphigenia, where the goddess Artemis, when Iphigenia is laid on the altar and sacrificed, all of the sudden decides she can’t go through with it, and she exchanges her at the last minute for a deer, kind of in the same way that Isaac is exchanged at the last minute for a ram in the Old Testament. She takes Iphigenia away with her to live as her companion in her wild hunt forever after that. I think that’s really beautiful too.
Do you have any contemporary influences? Poets you admire?
Specifically, for mythology, I would definitely say Alice Oswald and Ann Carson have definitely been major lights in my own process. I’ve returned to things like Autobiography of Red or Memorial over and over again. I just think that they’re amazing in the way that they approach the source material and the way that they honor the source material. And don’t feel shy about giving some twists to the source material, was really helpful in the way that I thought about Helen of Troy, 1993. In terms of just other poets that I love and admire and learn from over and over again, I’d say Victoria Chang, Jericho Brown, Natasha Trethewey, Diane Seuss, Rita Dove. There are so many whose books are thumbnailed and dogeared all to bits on my shelf. A couple of weeks ago, I picked up Francesca Abbate’s Troy, Unincorporated. It’s a full-length collection that retells the story of Troilus and Cressida, who were originally minor characters in the Iliad, who then through Chaucer and later Shakespeare drew them out after that. And she’s retelling Troilus and Cressida in rural Wisconsin. It’s amazing. So good.
Do you have any plans moving forward, forthcoming works?
I’d like for whatever my next project is, which is in the works but still in the exploratory phase, to be a step away from this book to challenge myself in new ways.
Helen of Troy, 1993 is now available from Scribner.
Maria Zoccola is the author of Helen of Troy, 1993 (Scribner, 2025). She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University. Her work has previously appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Memphis. Learn more about her work at mariazoccola.com.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
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