Maria Zoccola is the author of the new poetry collection Helen of Troy, 1993. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Ploughshares and The Kenyon Review.
Q: In your book’s Afterword, you write, “I’ve always struggled with Helen, even while studying classics back in college.” Can you say more about that? How did you come to write this collection?
A: Helen is a complicated character, one who does not lend herself to easy understanding. She begins her life as a princess of Sparta, becomes queen of Sparta when she marries Menelaus, and then becomes a princess of Troy when Paris steals her away across the ocean (or perhaps they run away together; accounts vary).
The Greeks launch a 10-year war to get Helen back, a war that slaughters a generation of men and ends the Age of Heroes in Greece, and at the war’s end, Helen is reclaimed by her former husband and reinstalled as queen of Sparta.
When I was younger, I found this narrative arc unsatisfying, and I was much more interested in the other women around Helen, who universally end their stories slain or enslaved.
When I wrote poems about women from the Trojan War, as I often found myself doing at the start of the pandemic, I focused on these other women—Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Andromache, and their peers—and left Helen’s name in the dust.
But in 2021, out of nowhere, I found this incredible voice flowing into my notebook pages. It was Helen’s voice, but modern, familiar, part of my own Tennessee childhood. I simply kept writing until the poems stopped arriving, and by the end of about 18 months, I was holding an entire full-length collection.
The process of writing this book was transformational to my relationship with Helen: I began to understand, in a way I never did before, how the Homeric Helen was just as much under the control of the gods, fate, and the men around her as the other women of the Iliad, and that perhaps the best understanding of Helen was in fact as an imperfect woman orchestrating her own survival with the very small amount of agency remaining to her.
These days, I find Helen to be a fascinating character. I could talk about her for hours.
Q: Why did you set the poems in 1993?
A: In writing this collection, I was undertaking the process of bringing Helen out of a past that feels very hazy and indistinct (Bronze Age Greece, more than 3,000 years ago) and into a past that feels—at least for those of us born before the new millennium—much more comprehensible.
I didn’t begin writing the book with a target year in mind, but as I thought through my first few poems, I realized how easy it was, yet how dangerous it was, to lean on that kind of generalized nostalgia that’s easy to fall into when working on a story set in the time period of one’s own childhood.
I saw very quickly that specificity in my detail work—things like magazine headlines, breakfast foods, even nail polish colors—would serve the book in much stronger ways.
This necessitated significant research, but also required that I lock myself into a timeline: When was Helen born? What year did she get married? What year was my end point, when she returns from her affair with Paris? I started there, with my end point: 1993. The story unspooled much more smoothly after that.
Q: What did you see as the right balance between your own Helen and the Helen of myth?
A: I’ve loved Greek mythology since I was a little girl, and I’ve adored the Iliad in a powerful and abiding way since I first read the Robert Fagles translation in the ninth grade.
I have a deep respect for the myth tradition and the linguistic forms of the source material, and so when I strayed from the original in Helen of Troy, 1993, that departure was always undertaken with intention.
However, it’s also true that in all 24 books of the Iliad, Helen herself has only six scenes. This is a character who anchors the poem, the woman for whom the war is being fought, and she’s afforded very little real estate in a very long poem.
In the Iliad, Helen has few chances to tell the reader who she is. Our understanding of Helen, therefore, comes from the actions and opinions of the other characters in the poem, later Greek writers, and the dozens of interpretations of her through the ages.
Who is the real Helen? The accurate Helen? I think it may be impossible to say. My version, certainly, is simply another Helen in the many-voiced throng.
Q: The poet Maggie Smith said of the book, “Zoccola’s use of persona and anachronism are transformative, and the formal daring of these poems, including golden shovels from the Iliad, thrilled me.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: First of all, of course, hearing those words from Maggie Smith is absolutely surreal, and I am still in shock. It was a deep, deep honor to have my book in her hands.
Playing with form in this collection was joyful, meaningful work, especially through the use of golden shovels. In the golden shovel, a form created by the poet Terrance Hayes, the last word of each line recreates a phrase or line from another poem or text, typically a piece with which the golden shovel is in conversation.
In Helen of Troy, 1993, I used the golden shovel to bring actual lines from the Iliad (in the Fagles translation) into Sparta, Tennessee, moments from the epic when Helen is speaking or others are speaking to Helen.
Helen of Troy, 1993 was born from the Iliad, and pulling in language from this source text felt like binding my book even more tightly to its own lineage.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have a dozen different irons in the fire, or perhaps more accurately clay pots in the kiln. We’ll see which ones explode and which ones emerge whole and ready for use.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I am enormously grateful to everyone who has spent time with this book and these poems. What a joy to have a community listening to Helen’s voice.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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