Maria Zoccola: On Writing Breathlessness, Retelling and Repurposing Myth, and her Debut Poetry Collection ‘Helen of Troy, 1993’
Maria Zoccola effortlessly blends the myth and the modern in her debut poetry collection Helen of Troy, 1993 (Scribner, 2025), which reimagines the central figure Helen as a disgruntled Southern housewife. Throughout the book, you see a multitude of versions of the Homeric figure, from the eccentric and rebellious to the downright monstrous and visceral. Zoccola shows her “like she’s never been seen before,” and from the first page, you become enraptured in a world that is forever being turned on its head. I was captivated from my earliest introduction to the book, seeing the striking cover while scrolling social media, to becoming entirely immersed in Helen’s world through the scenes that Zoccola so meticulously and artfully sets. The poems, as fiery and inescapable as Helen herself on the cover, stay with you long after they’ve been read.
I spoke with Zoccola via email about the inspiration for Helen of Troy, 1993, as well as her lifelong fascination with the Iliad and other Greek mythology, the “inescapable focus” of the book’s cover art, women behaving “monstrously,” going against the norm, and more.
Erica Abbott: Congratulations on the release of your debut poetry collection!
In the afterword, you note that the earliest parts of Helen of Troy, 1993 were written in summer 2021 (but that you were immersed in the world of Greek mythology much earlier). Where did the seeds of Helen-as-disgruntled-housewife really come about for you?
Maria Zoccola: In the afterword, I write that Helen’s modern, breathless voice exploded into my notebook out of nowhere, and that really does feel true. I don’t think I can trace the origins of that initial creative impulse. But I’ve known fiction writers who say that entire plots, entire books have been born for them out of a single sentence or even a single phrase, and I think that’s what happened here with Helen. The very first notebook page I wrote in Helen’s voice held the seeds of the poems that would become “helen of troy’s new whirlpool washing machine” and “helen of troy cleans up after the barbecue,” which left me with just enough information about Helen’s life to want to know what came next. Was it E.L. Doctorow who once said that writing was like driving at night in the fog, making the whole trip by your headlights alone? Helen’s voice was my headlights, illuminating the next poem, and the next.
EA: Helen is centrally positioned as an imperfect woman, wife, mother. In many poems, other versions within those roles come to light: “helen judas, helen stranger, trojan helen, / helen of the outside,” “ghost-helen, helen made of mist / and light,” “prom queen helen, / feathered helen, grown up strange.” You note that you’ve always struggled with Helen and interpretations of her. In what ways did wrestling with these different versions of her, especially as a figure that remained “untouched” for you at the beginning of the project, help untangle her and help her be seen more clearly?
MZ: Helen has about six scenes in all twenty-four books of the Iliad. This is a character who anchors the poem, the woman for whom the entire Trojan War is being fought, and she’s only allowed to speak six times. Helen isn’t able to tell us who she is in the source material. Instead, we form our understanding of Helen from others: other characters in the poem, other mythological accounts of Helen’s life, the writings of theorists and historians throughout the ages, and other depictions in pop culture. The result, of course, is a multiplicity of Helens, an endless parade of versions of this character to choose from. Is she a duplicitous fallen woman, or a kind of mean-girl head cheerleader, or a wronged victim behind enemy lines, or an eidolon, or a demigod with her own plans and purposes, or any one of a thousand other interpretations? I write my own Helen into Helen of Troy, 1993, but my version is simply yet another in the lineup. I think it may be impossible to point to any single interpretation as the one true Helen, which is very freeing in its own way. Helen defies easy answers and easy scholarship. She keeps her secrets, even today.
EA: Through these series of narrative, persona poems, Helen’s life in Sparta, Tennessee, 1993, emerges: trips to the Piggly Wiggly, kids’ birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese, seeing Jurassic Park in theaters, feasting at Perkins. In the final few lines of the “Jurassic Park” poem, a visceral, poignant moment emerges when Helen takes note that her kid is crying in terror: “and i did / care i’m not a monster…but right then / i wasn’t me at all i wasn’t mama i wasn’t woman i wasn’t / helen…” I could quote this entire poem! Without giving too much of the ending away, can you speak a bit to the female rage and expected emotional labor laid out in this poem, and others?
MZ: Throughout this book, Helen is working hard to fit the edges of her body into the mold her community expects her to fill. To color inside the lines. In Helen’s community, “good wife and mother” is one of the only roles available for women; Helen has no other choices she can see. What does a good wife and mother look like? What does a good wife and mother do? In Helen’s mind, “good wife and mother” is what the women around her are, as a fundamental identity, whereas for Helen, “good wife and mother” is only a part in a movie she can act, a role she can fill. So when Helen’s edges begin spilling out of the mold, when she can’t seem to stop herself from coloring outside the lines, monstrous may be the easiest descriptor she can apply to herself, and her community can apply to her. In another poem, the women around her call her “unnatural” and “shocking” when she displays antinormative behavior. But as “helen of troy watches jurassic park in theaters” explores, behaving monstrously, unnaturally, shockingly… feels so, so good. It’s such a relief to color outside the lines, no matter the consequences.
EA: There’s a couple of poems that utilize Homeric forms and techniques of cataloging and epic simile, and a few poems that use the golden shovel form. I’m also curious about poems like the Chuck E. Cheese one, that uses no periods but clocks in at nearly two and a half pages. I can imagine the breathlessness, the feeling of not being able to get enough air in the lungs in a poem like this—in what ways do poems such as these work to mirror both the specific topic of the poem, as well as its source material?
MZ: Poems like “helen of troy surfs the net” and “helen of troy reigns over chuck e. cheese” have, as you pointed out, this breathless quality, this tumbling, furious rhythm, as if Helen has grabbed you by the shoulders and is getting it all off her chest without letting you get a word in edgewise. I used this kind of poetic structure when I wanted to immerse the reader in a specific scene, and when I needed to underline the ways Helen feels somewhat out of control of her own life. You ask how these poems mirror their source material—when I think of the oral tradition of the Iliad, I think about singers reciting the poem at feasts and gatherings, about the metrical regularity and phrasal formulas necessary for remembering and singing so many lines. In one way, these poems—an account-giving rooted so distinctly in Helen’s voice, like the craft of Southern storytelling—do echo that kind of oral tradition. But in another way, these breathless poems are about as far from the measured dactylic hexameter of the Iliad as it’s possible to get.
EA: The first poem sets the stage so beautifully for where the reader is being taken and for Helen “grasping for agency” throughout the book: “i want you silent. / i want you listening to me.” Then later, “at one time, truly, / we ourselves were girls” via the women of Sparta, who also note in the penultimate poem that “when you’re dead we’ll cherish you again.” What techniques or strategies did you find crucial when establishing Helen’s voice, as well as the Spartan women?
MZ: Helen’s community, as represented by the voices of the Spartan women, becomes a kind of carceral institution, punishing anti-normative behavior and policing the boundaries of social acceptability. “bless that child, / then chop her for parts,” they say about Helen’s daughter, for example. In the midst of this fraught environment, Helen’s voice took careful shaping. It was easy to see how Helen’s community viewed her and her decisions and actions, but to craft the truest voice for Helen as a character, I had to deeply understand how Helen viewed herself. In very early drafts of some of these poems, I made missteps in Helen’s characterization that required later correction, and in fact, there’s one Helen poem I published with a lit journal that didn’t make it into the final book because the voice wasn’t quite right. I sat with Helen through hundreds of notebook pages, exploring her voice through writing exercises and scraps of poems and scribbled tangles of words until it felt real and true and consistent, and I’m proud of the final version in the pages of the book.
EA: Can you speak a bit to how you repurpose the image of the swan in this collection? There’s a web that seems to emerge from start to finish: In “helen of troy makes an entrance”: “...to her ears there came / a humming…/ and my mother, poor woman, knew enough to fear / a daughter birthed to song.” to the end words of the final poem: “god planted a killing doom within us both, so even for generations still unborn, we will live in song.” This seems to tie into the mythos of “the spartan women discuss” series as revealed in the notes: “a swan is silent her whole life until she’s dying, at which point she sings the most beautiful song ever heard.” Are these repeated images of both song and swan interconnected in this way?
MZ: Yes, but only in the sense that this entire collection is about song—in the sense that every single Iliad retelling is, ultimately, about song. Song meaning the original oral tradition of the Iliad, song meaning an offering to the gods who control our lives, song even meaning the musical dancing that was a key religious duty for Bronze Age princesses, but most especially song meaning the structured and woven and predetermined nature of fate. This modern Helen, after all, is born into an old story: we’ve known the ending for thousands of years. We can all hum the tune of the Trojan War, no matter how many verses I change in the middle. The forward momentum of Helen’s fate, her song, is unstoppable. And yet it’s beautiful, isn’t it? When that swan sings, she gives us “a sound that could crack our foundations / that could transform us.”
I could talk for ages about the repurposed image of the swan. Suffice to say that I’m uncomfortable with the way that much of the art, mostly by male painters, depicting the myth of Leda and the swan is beautifully erotic. The violence of the rape is usually nowhere to be found. Modern depictions, mostly by female artists, return agency to Leda in a myriad of ways. I myself responded to the myth by removing Zeus from the image of the swan entirely, freeing the swan to take on new meanings and new purposes.
EA: Where does the nickname “the big cheese” come from that’s used to name Helen’s husband throughout this book? I was particularly struck by the way the speaker of “(interlude: the swan describes the war)” talks about both the big cheese and Helen: “where is helen? i don’t know, or else i would tell you.”
MZ: I first wrote “the big cheese” in “helen of troy in february,” and it made me laugh so much that I decided to keep using it. It’s such a silly way to refer to someone who is both important and self-important, and it helped to set the tone for Helen’s relationship to her husband. Throughout the book, the only character who is consistently allowed her full name is Helen herself. Even Helen’s daughter, Hermione, is only “the kid.” The book, the narrative, embeds itself within Helen’s psyche, and its most important concern is always Helen herself. There’s a lot we can read into in these naming conventions, and not all of it casts Helen in a flattering light. That’s okay: Helen is an imperfect woman and wife and mother, and not all of her choices and actions are likeable.
EA: When ordering the collection, what decisions were most critical for you in keeping the narrative arc? I’m thinking particularly about the series of “the spartan women discuss,” which you note is a sonnet crown, being spread throughout the collection as opposed to one after the other.
MZ: Ordering this collection was the hardest part of the writing process. I went through four separate layouts before settling on a “final” version, and after the book was acquired by Scribner, my editor and I went through three more layouts before landing on the one that appears in the final book. The book isn’t ordered chronologically, so the question was always in how to build the most satisfying emotional storyline while maintaining the narrative beats the reader needs to digest the action of the book. Where do we add flashbacks? Where do we take a pause to hear from other characters, like the Spartan women or the swan? I’m so pleased with the order we landed on for the collection, but getting there challenged me as a creator in ways I simply did not expect.
EA: I would love if you could speak to the cover, which features a painting by Frederick Sandys, who created many mythological works in his time, often influenced by “conceptions of tragic power”, which feels perfectly fitting here. The National Museums Liverpool notes that this painting is connected to another one of Sandys’s works titled “Helen and Cassandra”, which depicts Helen with a lock of hair in her mouth “in the manner of a spoiled child”. The full picture portrays her in this manner of being sulky or sullen so I’m very curious about the use of this tight-framed Helen we see on the cover of the book.
MZ: Isn’t the cover wonderful? I adore it. As the author, I of course had very little say in the choice of cover, but the Scribner design team did ask me if there were any broad notes I could provide on things I did and didn’t like in poetry book covers. My favorite trend right now is fine art used in book covers, and at the time, I was heavily hinting that the design team should use one of the Gustave Moreau paintings that inspire the ekphrastic poems inside the collection. Instead, the team chose the Sandys painting, which is simply perfect—more perfect, in fact, than the Moreau art would have been. In this cover, there’s nowhere to look that isn’t Helen; her face is in inescapable focus, in just the same way that Helen’s thoughts and agonies and obsessions are in inescapable focus within the book. We’re uncomfortably close to her both on the cover and in the poems inside.
EA: It goes without saying that Helen of Troy is not just a big influence in this collection, but obviously the influence. I love the note about “the Helen of myth might always be a question mark, but this Tennessee girl was an exclamation point.” I’m wondering if you can speak to your early childhood fascination with Greek and Roman myths and what draws you particularly to the Iliad and Odyssey (and Helen, as it turned out) as inspirations? You note that during the pandemic, you began writing the persona poems in the voices of women from the Trojan War. After spending so much time with Helen of Troy, would you see yourself venturing into other myths or mythological figures as poetic jumping off points for future projects, or returning to the ones pre-Helen?
MZ: I adore a tragedy, and the Iliad is nothing but heartbreak. The Iliad is, in some senses, the stopping point for the great myths of Greece. It is the enormous wave of death that ends the Greek Heroic Age, and after the Nostoi (the lost epic of homegoing from Troy), while other sagas unfold, we’ve entered into a new kind of timeline, full of smaller lives and smaller stories. Reading the Iliad feels, to me, like living inside the end of the world, sitting with the characters I love as they rapidly walk toward their last hours on earth.
I would love to pick up other myths and characters for future projects, and perhaps I will someday soon! Right now, though, I do feel the need to challenge myself in new ways, to push myself in new directions, so my next project may not be myth inspired. But I’m sure I won’t be able to stay away for long.
EA: Do you have a favorite poem from the collection? What is it about and can you share a snippet of it?
MZ: I don’t think I have a single favorite poem, but one piece I like a lot is “helen of troy catalogues her pregnancy cravings,” which you can read both in the book and online as The Missouri Review’s poem of the week from May 22, 2023. Not only did it delight me to employ the Homeric cataloguing technique to something as small and personal as hormonal food cravings, I was also able to work in some moments and phrases that made me laugh, like retelling the Trojan War with Smurfs, or talking about poor Giles Corey as “that one wizard in salem / they squashed to death in a tofu press.” “helen of troy catalogues her pregnancy cravings” is ultimately a poem tackling some pretty heavy subjects: Helen is justifiably worried that she does not want to be a parent or is not ready to be a parent, and maybe she’d prefer to end her pregnancy entirely. But the reason the poem works, I think, is that I’m allowing the humor to outline the moments of fear and panic, making them more comprehensible and transparent inside their funny packaging.
EA: In your Poets & Writers article, “What’s Left Out: The Poems That Haunt a Collection From the Outside,” you write about the almost-poems, whether it be the poems dropped early from a manuscript or from a nearly-published collection. I love the idea that books have secrets, as you note “a reader of Helen of Troy, 1993 has no idea that Helen once took a swing at the stock market.” What were other, “off-screen” moments you saw that readers will not, or on the flip side, poems you never could have imagined cutting to provide an alternative perspective?
MZ: Part of my writing process for Helen of Troy, 1993 involved playing with Helen’s voice through hundreds of notebook pages: I brought my notebook on planes and on long car rides, opened it between Zoom meetings, and spent long hours on the front porch scribbling bits of Helen’s life. Many of these pages went on to become the final poems in the book, but many more stayed as half-finished stanzas and piles of words never meant to exist beyond the privacy of pen and ink. I had Helen cutting oranges for Hermione’s soccer games, trading penny stocks from her couch, filling out a high-school questionnaire about her future plans, and sitting on the bathroom counter as a little girl while Leda cleaned up her dirty face from playing in the woods with her siblings. All this work in the early stages of the project was of course a lot of fun, but was also vital to grounding myself in Helen’s voice and outlook, creating the kind of three-dimensional character who could remain consistent—or realistically, humanly inconsistent—across the polished poems that would find their way into the final book.
EA: How does it feel for the book to be out in the world?
MZ: It’s absolutely thrilling. To have these poems go from my own head, to finding their first homes in journals and magazines, to reaching their larger audience as a complete book? Wow. I have never, not once, lost sight of how enormously lucky I am.
EA: What themes/elements are personally most central to really drawing a reader in who might not be as familiar with Greek mythology and is hesitant to approach a retelling of one of its central figures?
MZ: Having a vague familiarity with the story of the Trojan War is helpful when picking up this book, but it’s not necessary. I wasn’t interested in creating a book that could only be enjoyed by myth lovers such as myself, although I did have fun packing it with small references and Easter eggs that were just for my fellow myth nerds. On the whole, this book is—as they say in the publishing world—very “voice-y,” as well as accessible for both regular poetry readers and poetry novices without sacrificing craft. It allows its main character to tell you the full story, no background knowledge required.
EA: Who are some of your biggest literary influences?
MZ: There are so many poets creating masterful work inspired by mythology. Anne Carson and Alice Oswald are writers I return to over and over again, as well as Rita Dove, Paisley Rekdal, and Gregory Orr. In the past few months, I’ve also loved essa may ranapiri’s Echidna, Francesca Abbate’s Troy, Unincorporated, and Fiona Benson’s Vertigo & Ghost. When we think of Greek myth retellings, we often think of the juggernauts of fiction, like Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles. But the world of poetic myth retellings is vast and varied, and there’s always a surprising new voice to discover.
EA: Do you have any other projects you’re working on or hope to in the future?
MZ: I don’t know any poet who doesn’t have at least three or four projects on the go at any one time, but I’ve finally learned to keep quiet about them to keep them from dying on the vine. More from me soon!
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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.
