MARIA ZOCCOLA

Just now, on the way to my office at the University of Tampa, it dawned on me that we’re home of the Spartans. There’s this massive Spartan mascot on the building I’m in currently. 

Oh, how funny! I don’t think I noticed how many schools were either the Trojans or the Spartans until after this book. The war is continuing to be fought, even here in 2026.

(Laughing) Yes, yes. I remember a couple of years ago, your Helen poems were popping up in every literary magazine, and I was so excited to see the earliest “hatchlings” of this project! Considering Helen of Troy’s long literary afterlife—Marlowe’s “the face that launched a thousand ships” comes to mind—and the many women one might pluck from The Iliad, what made Helen such a compelling figure for a sustained character study?

Totally, yeah. It is kind of an important story in my life, how I transformed from finding Helen to be an unsympathetic character at fault for this war that slaughters a generation of men and ends the Age of Heroes in Greece. There’s a lot of baggage that comes with that name, Helen. We think primarily of beauty, yes, but also duplicity, betrayal—a woman that you can never fully trust…. I initially fell into that trap of not finding her sympathetic, or even particularly interesting, compared to so many of the other women in The Iliad, who, aside from the goddesses, fairly universally end their stories either slain or enslaved. To me, that’s a much more interesting narrative than Helen, who has a very cushy ride through the Trojan War, and no consequences afterward. 

However, in writing this book, I sat with Helen’s limited appearances in The Iliad. Of course, the characters talk about her, but she’s provided little real estate in the epic poem to speak her own truth. Along with Helen’s minor appearances, I sat with scholarship around Helen, other ancient Greek sources—the plays of Euripides—and even adaptations. I began to understand that Helen was a woman without choices. She’s told to marry her first husband, Menelaus. She’s given to her second husband, Paris, as a reward for naming Aphrodite first place in a beauty contest among immortals. She’s taken from Sparta by Paris, and from Troy by Menelaus. She’s treated as more of an object than a person. She’s also part of this oppressive, patriarchal culture, but it may be more complicated, more interesting, and more accurate to look into those original sources and find the threads of agency that the women already possess—the way that they are movers and shakers in their own culture. Helen has a keen political mind and talks out of both sides of her mouth to stay safe and strive for the outcome of the war that she wants. 

In the afterword, you describe her as “still unique, set apart, special—but not special enough to watch the tide of history turn on the axis of her body,” noting that “[i]n the eyes of Troy and Greece alike, Helen is the war, the embodiment of their suffering.” She’s also burdened with sin, guilt, judgement, and blame…. I mean, there’s a sense of containment and isolation mirrored formally and visually. We’re locked into Helen’s interiority—reinforced by the cover art’s close-up, side-eye glance (seen in Frederick Sandys’ earlier illustration)—

Isn’t it great?

It’s incredible! It makes me reflect on how the male heroes are deliberately benched in this retelling as we’re hyper-focused on Helen. There are also moments like “who // am i? i am asking / for the sake of research,” where the persona slips, raising questions about proximity to the poet.

I had an early reader of this book who said something like, “We’re rattling around in this woman’s head.” That felt so accurate to me. We are zoomed in so close, and even trapped with Helen inside these thoughts and experiences. It’s claustrophobic—

And kind of Dalloway-ish.

Absolutely! She’s going to buy the flowers herself…. We don’t get many breaks as a reader from being inside her head. Helen of Troy does this, Helen of Troy does that. There are only two series that offer the reader a break to view the world, action, and narrative from another perspective: the Spartan women who function as a Greek chorus to comment on the action, and then the swan speaking in prose poems. I’m keeping the reader pinned in, hemmed in—trapped, caged—with Helen inside her life.

How close am I to Helen as a character? That’s the great question of persona poetry. Is the persona operating as a mask or not for the poet herself? If the word persona is a Latin word meaning “mask,” does it refer to a Venetian carnival mask, or a Greek theatrical mask? Theatrical masks would have been made of wood and canvas, and they were massive—fitting over the entire head of the performer like a college football mascot head might be today, right?

True, true. 

They had tiny little eye holes, making them difficult to see out of, a huge mouth—the whole thing functioned as a resonance chamber for the actor’s voice. An early microphone, almost. But all performance in ancient Greece was sacred to the god Dionysus, who is the god of wine and having a good time. He’s also the god of transforming from one mental state to another mental state, which can be achieved through sacred drunkenness, yes, but also through theatrical performance. Becoming a new character, no longer yourself, unable to see out of tiny eye holes—becoming this other embodied being on the stage. Is the mask functioning as a Dionysian mask, where you have fully become this character, and it’s no longer you speaking? You’re just piloting them across the stage. Or is it an easily removable Venetian carnival mask? I think different poets have different ways of using persona. I strove to be more of a Dionysian, ancient Greek theatrical mask that is fully the character on the page. Helen is a character I’m developing in the same way that a novelist might develop a character, as opposed to hiding myself inside. 

Yeah, and you trained in fiction writing, primarily?

Yes, all my degrees are in fiction, which I think is maybe the root of the problem here.

 Not at all. I’m gripped by your use of persona. In the opening poem’s utter exhaustion and rejection of damning narratives (“helen judas, helen stranger, trojan helen, helen of the outside,”), your Helen turns the tables: “i don’t want to hear it. i want you silent. / i want you listening to me.” The collection seems in conversation with a lineage of feminist and contemporary myth revision, from H.D.’s Helen in Egypt to Emily Wilson’s translations of Homer. Louise Glück’s Averno, Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife, and Bernadette Mayer’s The Helens of Troy, New York are also in the mix. Were any of these a source of inspiration for you? 

I grew up during the golden age of YA literature. At twelve, I began reading YA mythology retellings—Adèle Geras, for example. However, in poetry, I don’t think I sought out myth retellings until after I had finished this book, wondering, who else is doing this sort of thing? I didn’t want to feel alone. But I’ve always loved Anne Carson and Alice Oswald, who bring the ancient world into the modern world in really unique ways. I went on to read Rita Dove’s Mother Love and Francesca Abbate’s Troy Unincorporated. I started a list, collecting poetic myth retellings, and now I have about forty—we are legion!  

 What a constellation! I came across a social media post where you were asked whether Helen was “brat” or “demure,” a joke that reiterates a long history of forcing women into reductive binaries: the Madonna/whore split, the Angel of the House ideal, the “girl you save” versus the one you punish. Given the indeterminacy surrounding Helen—whether she was abducted or left Menelaus of her own free will—how do you read this impulse to categorize her? Does that ambiguity deepen her complexity, and does it even matter whether Helen is agent or victim? Is the Trojan War really about Helen, or is she merely an excuse or catalyst for masculine violence and glory?

Hmm, interesting. Ultimately, the easy answer to that question is that the purpose of war is to enact violence. There are no deeper reasons. And yet, the story of the Trojan War is a story—a legend, a piece of oral history that has little basis in actual history. In a way, I do think that the reason for the Trojan War is Helen because it isn’t real. 

A delightful aspect to this adaptation is that you’ve moved us from Bronze Age Greece to small-town America, and your Helen is a disgruntled housewife in Sparta, Tennessee, circa 1993. There’s this disorienting blur of mythology and nineties nostalgia. The walls of Troy are exchanged for football fields, Perkins booths, and tangles of kudzu. Homer’s “wine-dark sea” becomes your “booze-dark sea.” What drew you to this bluegrass city on the road between Nashville and Knoxville? How does the history and culture of Sparta, Tennessee—its landscape, labor practices, and regional character—reshape the epic, and what parallels or tensions emerge between these two worlds?

You know, I didn’t intend for the book’s Sparta, Tennessee to be a representation of real-world Sparta, Tennessee. It was a happy coincidence that both exist. I used the vague geographic location to inform the choices I made around nature, landscape, agriculture, and human culture to build this world, because you must anchor somewhere. 

I love how we’re immersed in place—the tobacco fields, the dark cave systems explored on spelunking tours….

That place on the Calfkiller River, between Nashville and Knoxville, was a method to inform the rest of my research. When asked about the larger question of why Tennessee, occasionally, there’s a tone to it, like, “Why would you bring it to Tennessee? Why not New York City?” Of course, the answer is because I’m from Tennessee. I love this land, this culture, these people. The South is such a rich, dynamic, valuable, transformational part of the country, despite the darkness that also lives here. It deserves every kind of story to be told here.

I was thinking about how the intertemporal allusions and vernacular style make the story super engaging. While you don’t use dactylic hexameter, you preserve this fiercely tumbling rhythm, and in the audiobook especially, your Southern accent surfaces when Helen is most worked up, “ranting,” and at her most performative—such as in “helen of troy calls her sister.” How did you channel this voice?

It’s so funny, I warned everyone when recording this audiobook, I was like, “Listen, there are some poems that you’re gonna wonder where this accent came from.” I can’t read them any other way, it just comes out—like I’m talking to my granny. I think the accent has been suppressed from a lot of Southerners, especially if they left home for school, or for work, etc. That natural accent can make outsiders think that you’re stupid, that you don’t understand. The easier thing is to learn how to tamp it down and not speak that way, except when you’re around your own people. Helen’s voice is the thing that arrived first, before the larger narrative. That specific voice, that accent, was irrepressible.

 In poems like “helen of troy gets the news from her sister,” everyday domestic life collides with a steady stream of wartime violence, which Helen details: “‘93 meant death in daily installments…we talk car bombs and clinton / and an alabama amtrack run off the big bayou bridge…we’re bombing mogadishu, we’re bombing baghdad.” This parallels the brutality and carnage in The Iliad. Perhaps the battle narratives serve to show connections between mortals and gods—how inevitable everything feels when fickle gods can control human fate. It also makes us think about trauma and the impacts of war on the individual and the family unit. What were you hoping to reveal about the politics of war in both times and places?

Earlier, we talked about the purpose of war: can it be a woman? Pure violence? Honor? Fate? What is the root of war? What is the root of The Iliad as an epic poem? The answer is violence. It remains to this day the most violent piece of work I have ever read. Spears transfixing soft palates. People getting arrows in the eye. People crushed under chariot wheels. Its graphic violence is rendered on the page without flinching. Any retelling of The Iliad that doesn’t keep the violence of the original can’t be a true retelling. I struggled with what I was going to do with the war. Eventually, I reduced the Trojan War to one poem, “(interlude: the swan describes the war).” It’s after Helen’s left for her affair, Menelaus is on the front porch battling wasps with pesticide from Home Depot. That’s the sum total of the war, but I needed that sense of violence, that uncertainty of violence—physical, psychological—to soak through and threaten every poem. Even though there aren’t literal arrows flying around small-town Tennessee, it’s a place of fascinating carceral politics that contains inhabitants in this panopticon of social control. You’ve got eyes on you constantly. 

Similarly, there’s attention on the role of religion in both worlds, where we have gods of Greek mythology and “pristine southern church ladies.” Christianity’s language of judgment and eternal punishment quietly governs. You’ve said that the “Spartan women [are] a kind of carceral institution, punishing anti-normative behavior and policing the boundaries of social acceptability.” Did you grow up in a religious environment in Memphis?

 Even when you don’t grow up in an intensely religious environment in the South, and perhaps much of America, the adherence to Christian norms is pervasive, inescapable. I grew up going to church every Sunday, sometimes Saturdays. I went to an all-girls Christian school from kindergarten through the 12th grade. Even through all of that, I did not consider that I was in a deeply Christian space. Looking back, I was in contact with organized religion every single day, and yet it didn’t feel like I was swimming in the soup of Christianity until exiting that place for the first time. I explored that with Helen, because I don’t think she’d consider herself to be a deeply religious person, and yet religion coats her experience of her world.

Across poems like “helen of troy’s new whirlpool washing machine” and “helen of troy folds laundry,” domestic labor becomes both gendered and public chatter, as gossiping Spartan women air Helen’s dirty laundry to the rest of the neighborhood. Since there’s much mention of the unfaithful but dutiful wife “suck[ing] out the stains,” I’m thinking about cleaning as a metaphor (and, not insignificantly, Ajax is also a cleaning product). Paired with the classical tradition of women weaving—Penelope, Arachne, Helen herself—how does this handiwork function as authorship? Is the tapestry a method to revise and preserve her own story?

Arachne, Helen, and Penelope approach weaving in different ways in their mythologies. In the mythology of ancient Greece, the labor we see noble women performing is weaving. They’re not cleaning, raising children. Weaving is the duty of a good, noble girl. It serves as a way to check in, like “Helen’s at the loom doing what she’s supposed to do.” Does she want to weave? Does she obtain self-satisfaction out of doing these tasks, or does it fulfill expectations? Helen is weaving the scenes of the battle outside her window into her work, kind of liveblogging the Trojan War and recording history.  I think the larger function is to show Helen, the great sinner, being a good girl. 1993 Helen functions similarly where weaving is like doing laundry, picking up “The Kid,” pushing that cart at Piggly Wiggly. She’s doing what a homemaker is supposed to do. She’s checking boxes. 

 In the delivery ward, she is “held down, picked clean” and disconnected from the Big Cheese (Menelaus). “helen catalogues her pregnancy cravings” is so exuberant but also explores how pregnancy is oppressively laborious: “cheesecake. jelly rolls, i’m trying / to weigh myself down, and the kid’s not doing it / fast enough. a house has to settle on its foundation.” What can you share about Helen’s conflictions about her desires, sexuality, and motherhood?

Helen’s relationship to motherhood was one of my great fascinations. Some mythological accounts give Helen several children, but most give her only one child, her daughter, Hermione. Women in mythology usually had fifteen, twenty sons who went off to do really amazing things, but for Helen to only birth one child—Hermione, a girl—and that’s it? That’s interesting to me. Hermione is said to be very beautiful, but not as beautiful as Helen. That would give me a complex. I wondered about their relationship. When she leaves Hermione behind, does she weep for her missing daughter every single day? Does she long to get back to this child she’s lost? Or is Hermione an afterthought—a footnote in Helen’s life, a thing that happened to her body once?

 In “helen of troy reigns over chuck e. cheese,” she braves the whispers of the “first-baptist-ladies’-association busybodies” to escort Hermione to a birthday party at the “rat-themed / las vegas.” Ostracized as a “devil-licking jezebel,” Helen climbs a tower and shares in a bonding moment with her daughter: “i’ll tell her / everything, i’ll tell her the ugliest and most beautiful parts / of walking out that door and coming home again.” I found this a tender meditation on mother-daughter solidarity, confession, and the possibility of forgiveness.

Truly, and yet, on the flip side of that, I’m thinking as I’m writing that poem, like, “Helen, what are you doing?” Why would you tell a twelve-year-old why you left her and her father for an affair?

If we can turn to how the book steps outside Helen’s perspective through formal sequences: golden shovels drawn from Robert Fagles, ekphrastic poems on Gustave Moreau, a Greek Chorus sonnet crown, and the recurring swan interludes. The swan poems feel tonally different—calmer, unruffled—as in “(interlude: the swan describes the ouroboros),” where settings blur: “i see a house, i / see a palace. i see chevrolets and long ships, streetlights and torches. / there are fields wherever i look, watered and fed on monsanto or / blood.” What role do these interludes play structurally and thematically?

 The purpose of the swan in this book is disconnected from the purpose of the swan in Helen’s mythology, wherein Zeus comes to Helen’s mother, Leda, in the form of a swan and rapes her. Zeus is Helen’s father, and this symbol of erotic danger. I wanted the swan to be free to be and become something totally new in this book. Swan imagery is threaded throughout in wings, white feathers, long necks, “birdseed and eggshells.” The swan is a guardian angel for Helen and an anima for Helen herself and the whole town. It’s an omniscient narrator removed from the action to provide insights, detached from Helen’s headspace. They’re structurally different being in prose poems. They’re slower, more introspective—a breath for the reader. 

The swan describing the ouroboros, that’s the only point where actions of 1993 Tennessee tie back to Bronze Age Greece. I removed the kind of veil between those two time periods to reveal how everything is connected—just separated by geography and history. The Ouroboros, the snake biting its own tail. Everything comes back around…. 

Yes, and then to consider that in relation to the ideas of cyclical narratives and generational curses that follow in “helen of troy catches reruns,” makes me think back to Hermione, the mother-daughter relationship, and how there’s the possibility for a new trajectory for them.

The beautiful thing about Greek mythology is that there are very few characters for whom disaster is not inevitable. That’s the root of a story, right? Hermione does share the cursed bloodline. 

 In one of the final poems, you write, “we’ll remember how you launched yourself: / beautiful and suffering. mortal as a wound.” This line underscores your thesis, I think, where this re(vision) grants Helen choices about her future. It’s committed to providing agency and choices to a figure conceived through sexual violence—a threat follows her in poems like “helen of troy is asked to the spring formal” and “helen of troy goes parking with the defensive tackle.” But I wonder why Helen ultimately chooses to return to Sparta. Did you ever consider an alternate ending? 

Somebody asked me this in an interview months ago, and it forced me to confront the role I played in keeping Helen’s life small. I do think that any version of an Iliad retelling that erases the end and writes its own is not a real retelling. If it removes violence, it’s not a real retelling. The great cyclical myth structure honors the original story. Returning Helen to her old life in Sparta, Tennessee, to her family, is saying, “No,  you can’t hop a plane to Hollywood and become an actress. You must come back.” 

Now that you’ve left Helen’s brain, I wonder where your poems are leading you. 

I really feel like I could have written Helen poems forever. I could drop her off in a movie theater, Chuck E. Cheese, Walgreens, a dance studio. It was so fun to build, but I had achieved what I set out to do. I had to push myself out of my Helen comfort zone—that beautiful little circle that I drew for myself in the dirt… Lately I’ve been thinking about my time on a high school archery team, the role of religion in the South, my own life and history—removing the persona mask and writing as Maria. I’m just seeing where the muse takes me. Sing muse; I’m listening.

Interview Posted: March 18, 2026