Our poetry editor Jessica Cuello interviews Maria Zoccola about her debut collection, which has received critical praise from The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and many more. TLR published “helen of troy recovers at st. francis,” in Issue 23, Summer 2022.

JC: Helen of Troy is the voice of the poems in Helen of Troy, 1993. She is vulnerable and defiant, unapologetic and down-to-earth. In an essay in the back of the book you explore the Helen figure. For those who don’t have a copy of the book yet, could you talk a little about why this figure resonates for you? And why she easily finds a home in Sparta, Tennessee in 1993?

MZ: I’ve adored Greek myth since I was a little girl, so I was steeped in Troy long before I ever read the Iliad in the ninth grade. I couldn’t get enough of the way everything seemed to converge on Troy, as if all of Greek myth had been leading to this bloody, ten-year moment. But it’s actually quite funny—prior to writing this book, I didn’t like Helen very much at all. When I was younger, I found Helen to be a frustrating character, with a narrative arc that felt much less satisfying than that of the other women of the Iliad, who fairly universally end their stories slain or enslaved. Helen, who rules Sparta, then waits out the war in comfort as a princess of Troy, and then heads home to rule Sparta again, didn’t seem to me to deserve her cushy fate, and I tended to leave her alone when writing work that touched on Troy’s myth tradition. Beginning the first poems for Helen of Troy, 1993, therefore, was entirely unexpected for me, and I certainly didn’t plan for a full collection from the outset. But Helen is loud, and insistent, and in these poems has a voice that can’t be ignored or set down, and after eighteen months of exploring her hurts and desires on the page, I had an entire book together.

The process of writing this book was transformational to my relationship with Helen as a character. The other men and women in the Iliad point to Helen as both casus belliand the embodiment of their suffering; I, by contrast, began to understand her as a woman without choices, operating with a calculating political mind at the reaches of her limited scope of influence to keep herself safe. Helen is a survivor, doing as much as she can with what little agency she retains in the Iliad, compressed by fate, the gods, and the men around her. I became fascinated by Helen. I fell in love with Helen, this demigod ill-suited to both the Sparta and Troy of Bronze Age Greece and of 1990s Tennessee and yet belonging to them anyway. You ask why she “easily” finds a home in Sparta, Tennessee—I’m not sure Helen easily finds a home anywhere. She’s a piece with too many tabs and sockets to fit any space in the puzzle, and yet she wedges herself in regardless. Wedges herself, or perhaps is wedged. What would she do if she were set free? We don’t get to find out in the Iliad or in 1993, but I wonder.

“Helen can’t quite understand why her life looks the way it does, even though the shape of that life is familiar”

JC: Your use of persona reminds me a little bit of the poet Ai. Can you talk about the ways that persona intersects with the self? Do you view persona as a mask?

MZ: As a mask—for me, no. Perhaps it’s because I trained primarily as a fiction writer (all my degrees are in fiction), but I’ve approached persona in my work in the same way a fiction writer approaches a character in a novel. I find that persona intersects with the self in the same way all writing intersects with the self on some level, is a way of understanding the self on some level, but in my work, I’m specifically using persona to explore lives I’ve never lived and experiences I’ve never had. I find persona enormously freeing and expansive in this way. I developed Helen as a character across a narrative arc of discrete-yet-linked poems using similar tools for planning and execution as I might when working on a short story or the draft of a novel. Even when crafting a persona poem not joined to a specific series, I find I’m interested in creating in the poem a single moment in time in that speaker’s life or a single pattern of thought or understanding unique to them. This is certainly not the only way to approach persona, of course, but it’s the avenue I find myself walking down most often.

JC: Childbirth and mothering feature prominently in the book. Violence continually lurks below the surface and at the edges of the poems. Could you talk about the pairing of these elements?

MZ: The world is violent, womanhood is violent, and more than anything else, the Iliad is violent. Brutally, graphically violent: spears thrust through eye sockets, bodies piled high enough to clog the flow of rivers. The violence of this collection’s mother text bleeds through the edges of many of the poems in both overt and less obvious ways, and I never felt like I was shoehorning it in; the American South is, after all, another place of great ferocity. And for Helen, one of the bloodiest subjects of all is motherhood.

In mythological accounts, Helen is often given only one child, her daughter, Hermione. For a woman who would have married young in a time before modern birth control, this is surprising to me. Helen leaves Hermione behind when she removes or is removed from Sparta, and Helen speaks so little in the Iliad that we have no way of knowing what effect this separation has on her. What is the relationship like between Helen and Hermione? Is Helen a loving mother, deeply concerned with her daughter’s happiness and welfare? Or is Helen a person incapable of the kind of contraction of self that motherhood requires? I pondered these question throughout the writing process, and the answers with which I emerged are inconclusive. Suffice to say that Helen, unable to fit herself comfortably anywhere, similarly finds motherhood to be the wrong shape for her body. She cuts herself on it, and yet she cannot put it down.

JC: In your essay you talk about the trajectory of the poems and how they were created. Could you retell the story of their genesis that began in 2020?

MZ: In 2020, I was channeling my restless, anxious, early pandemic energy into persona poems I was writing in the voices of women from the Iliad—Clytemnestra, Hecuba, Cassandra, women whose stories I’d been carrying around since I was very young. I shelved most of these poems, but I did send out a small handful of them; if you’re interested, I published “andromache at epirus” with Grain Magazine and “like a ghost, iphigenia” with Salt Hill. I never explored Helen’s voice in this poetry project, for all the reasons I talk about above. I had not yet learned to love her. I played with these poems for the first half of 2020, and then I moved on: new work, new themes, new ideas. I moved back to Tennessee, bought a house, started a new job. And about a year later, truly out of nowhere, I grabbed for my notebook and wrote seven Helen poems in a row. But unlike those early Iliad poems, which were set at least vaguely in and around Bronze Age Greece, the voice that emerged in these new poems felt contemporary, familiar. I felt as if I were writing into my own childhood in 1990s Tennessee, and I knew that I needed to keep writing until Helen finished speaking. I’m grateful she had so much to say.

JC: HELEN of TROY, 1993 is distinctly American; the poems let it all in: the mess of work and the junk of America. Helen navigates the Piggly-Wiggly, gets her kid on the school bus, cleans cat piss, and frequently does laundry, among other tasks. I find that this world exerts an oppressive force in the lives of the characters, creating a desire to escape and disappear even as this world is fully rendered and present in the book. Would you be willing to share your thoughts on this tension as you see it in the work, and maybe how it relates to the Greek myth?

MZ: In the book’s penultimate poem, which is also the final poem in the book’s sonnet crown, the women of Sparta explain that Helen “looked every minute / over her shoulder for the real life / she was promised, but her neck was too short / and she could not see it.” Have you ever looked around yourself and felt that way? I mean, Walgreens and vacuuming—that’s it? This is what we have? Surely that’s not right. Surely a mistake was made along the way, and if we could just put it to rights, file the correct support ticket and get God on the line, we could get this ship pointed in the right direction. I think Helen can’t quite understand why her life looks the way it does, even though the shape of that life is familiar, even though surely she must have seen that life building around her step by step—house, marriage, baby. And step by step, there’s certainly a part of Helen, maybe even a large part, that understood she was entombing herself in, as you say, the mess of work and the junk of America. She does her best to slough off her whole world in her affair with Paris, but one of the demons she’s running from is, of course, herself. And as any of us know who’ve switched schools, cities, relationships, hobbies in an attempt to run from our own selves, the self just keeps following along behind, stuck to the heels like a shadow in strong sun.

You ask about Greek myth. The tethers of society bind us in every age, and it’s notable to me that in the Homeric epics, the prescribed activities of good noble women are clearly defined. Noble women like Helen may not be cooking and cleaning, but they’re also not free to go where they please and do as they like. Good noble girls in particular spend their time weaving, and this is what we see of Helen in the Iliad. She’s creating a vast tapestry recording the ebb and flow of the war outside her window, long hours at her loom every single day. The reader has no ability to know if she enjoys the work, but it’s expected of her, so she’s doing it. Even in this extreme environment, she’s proving to Troy that she can act the part. She can take up the work required of her rank and position, whether or not it’s making her feel as trapped and frenzied as 1993’s Helen with her groceries and trips to the drycleaner.

JC: The book is such a pleasurable and engrossing read. A lot of this has to do with form: frequent catalogues of cultural items, the lower-case “i” – a lot of compressed activity in a short space. Could you comment on your formal choices. Were they organic? And what poets influenced your forms in this book?

MZ: There’s so much to talk about with form in this book, a mixture of organic and studied choices that draw together to create Helen’s tumbling, breakneck rhythms. Much of Helen of Troy, 1993 is free verse, but I did make some specific formal choices that felt right for the book, such as a sonnet crown in the voices of the women of Sparta, poems that use Homeric poetic techniques like cataloguing and the epic simile, and of course golden shovels. The golden shovel—a form invented by Terrance Hayes—has thrilled me ever since I first ran across his original “The Golden Shovel,” which of course makes use of Gwendolyn Brooks for its source text. The ability of the golden shovel as a poetic form to speak back to and comment on a parent text, I feel, allows it to punch way above its weight in terms of the work it can be called on to do in a collection or as a standalone piece. In this book, I used golden shovels to bring actual lines from the Iliad, in the Robert Fagles translation, into 1993 Tennessee. These lines were always dialogue spoken to Helen by other characters or that Helen says herself. Helen only has six scenes in the Iliad, so the reader only has six chances to understand who Helen is and how she thinks. Pulling these few and rare moments into Helen of Troy, 1993 allowed me to bind the collection to its own mother text in a tangible way, anchoring the two together and preventing this new Helen of station wagons and hairspray from drifting too far away from her ancient forebear. And, too, I’ve been carrying the Fagles translation around with me—physically and metaphorically—since I was 14 years old. This is the language that has held me spellbound for more than half my life, that has served as a kind of linguistic food for me. I wanted it, maybe needed it, in my final book.

JC: Helen begins as an enigmatic figure for you. Did your view of her change during the writing process? What about the world of your 90s childhood? Did the creative process offer insight or shift your understanding of that era?

MZ: I talked a little about Helen herself earlier in this interview, so let me switch focus to the nineties. I was a child in that era, and my memories are a child’s memories. There are period-specific moments in this book that are entirely mine, the “aural overload” of Chuck E. Cheese, pinning a butterfly clip in my hair with spring-balanced wings, but much of what I could offer the book from my own childhood was incomplete: it needed the lens of an adult understanding. I was not an adult in the early nineties, but Helen is, and the recontextualization of that era she provided was fascinating. I wondered how much more confining a small Southern town would be in the age of the early internet, how many fewer options there might seem to be. How isolationist her world. My own mother went to law school in the mid-eighties in another small Southern town, and while she was there was frequently told she was taking a place away from a man, that a woman’s role was home, kids, husband. “Better dead than co-ed,” the male students would chant. That’s not to say that important feminist work was not happening in this time and in these places (my mother was in law school!), but my sense is that it required what might feel like a great breaking away from tradition, that when Helen wants more than what she sees all around herself, she would not feel that her voice is joining a throng lifted up both near and far, but rather that she’s speaking alone into the dense air, muffled and judged. This is not New York. This is not even Nashville. This is Sparta, Tennessee, a fictional place that feels real because like all parts of the South, it is simultaneously holy/home/family/worth/culture/comfort and the kind of black hole that allows no permanent escape.

JC: Tahoma published “helen of troy recovers at st. francis” in Issue 23. Do you have a favorite poem from the book that you could share with readers here?

MZ: This question is always so difficult, because of course most of the poems in the book are my favorite poems for one reason or another. Lately when asked this question I’ve been pointing to “helen of troy catalogues her pregnancy cravings,” which was a Poem of the Week at The Missouri Review and which you can read online here:

“helen of troy catalogues her pregnancy cravings” by Maria Zoccola

One of the joys of working on this book was working with Homeric forms and conventions or otherwise sliding in Homeric references—mostly for my own delight rather than for any external reader. Here, I’ve riffed on the famous Catalogue of Ships in Book Two of the Iliad, and of course I’ve turned The Smurfs into a funhouse-mirror reshoot of the Trojan War.

JC: What are you working on now?

MZ: I had such fun playing with persona in Helen of Troy, 1993, and right now I feel myself entering poems a little closer to the self, to the personal. Sometimes this feels frightening or dangerous, and sometimes it feels so powerfully healing that I astound myself with how deeply I can breathe when I lay down the pen.

JC: What are you reading now? What have you read and loved this year?

MZ: I’m rereading some Diane Seuss right now—there’s something about how she can cram so much into a single poem without the poem itself feeling overstuffed or too heavy for the reader to hold that I admire enormously; I’m always trying to decode her secrets. I also just tore through Victoria MacKenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain, which traces the lives of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, a beautiful and searching exploration of faith and femaleness in Medieval England. It pairs very nicely with Lauren Groff’s Matrix, which I also loved.