Ancient Myth Meets Modern Poetry in “Helen of Troy, 1993” https://ift.tt/QYrGCp3
Poet Maria Zoccola’s debut poetry collection, Helen of Troy, 1993, reimagines the mythological Helen from the Greek city-state of Sparta as a dissatisfied housewife living in small-town Sparta, Tennessee, in the early 1990s. The collection bridges ancient myth and modern storytelling in poems that grapple with agency, family and small-town social dynamics.
Using a mixture of free-verse and formalist techniques, her poetry follows Helen along the path of her coming of age, marrying the wrong man, birthing a child she may not be ready to parent and beginning an affair that throws her whole life into chaos.
Maria Zoccola is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University and has spent several years leading creative writing workshops for middle and high school youth. Her work has previously appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, ZYZZYVA and elsewhere, and she has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize.
Do you have any connection to Sparta where your poetry is set? If not, was there a reason you chose Sparta as your setting?
I’m Memphis born and raised, and no, I have no direct connection to Sparta — but Helen does, of course. In mythology, Helen was born a princess of the Greek city-state of Sparta and became queen of Sparta upon her marriage to Menelaus and her father’s abdication. She was taken from Sparta by the Trojan prince Paris (or perhaps they ran away together), but after the destruction of Troy, she returned to Sparta as queen and remained there for the rest of her life.
The Sparta of this collection is not intended to be an exact representation of the real-world Sparta of White County, Tennessee (for one thing, the book’s Sparta is a little bit bigger than the real town; it has a Chuck E. Cheese, after all). But I did use the real-world Sparta’s geography and natural world to inform my poetics, to bring Helen’s world of hills and kudzu and fields to life.
As I began crafting the first few poems that would become Helen of Troy, 1993, I already knew I was writing into the world of my own childhood in Tennessee in the early nineties, which meant Helen needed to come south to Tennessee as well. How efficient, therefore, to locate the poems in a new kind of Sparta, a place not of queens but still very much of power.
What inspired you to imagine Helen as a modern housewife?
The first piece I wrote for this collection was “helen of troy’s new whirlpool washing machine,” a poem in which a disgruntled housewife pesters her husband for a shiny new washer to replace their old broken one.
The poem seemed to appear in my notebook out of nowhere: this powerful, hilarious voice arrived on the page and demanded I listen to her, because she was going to tell me who she was, whether or not I wanted to hear it.
I realized almost immediately that this brand-new version of Helen was a housewife who felt stifled by her role and yet unable to picture a new path forward for herself. She was like a trapped animal nearly ready to chew her own leg off to escape, no matter the consequences.
Each new poem gave me just enough information about her life to lead me to the next piece, and I was so curious about this fascinating, cliff-edge woman that before I knew it, I had written an entire book.
What do you hope readers take away from your book?
This collection is, ultimately, a story familiar to nearly everyone: an unhappy woman, a marriage in trouble, an affair, a community full of gossip. Pantheon of gods not included.
For readers who are a little shy of poetry, who maybe haven’t given verse a try since their high school English classes, I hope you come away from Helen of Troy, 1993 understanding that poetry is a living and breathing art form that welcomes all readers, no matter their experience level.
For mythology fans, I hope I’ve created a Trojan War retelling you never saw coming, something that turns the story on its head while remaining true to the fundamentals of Helen as a character.
And for my poetry lovers, I hope this is a collection you can return to over and over and find something new each time. This work fed me as I created it, and I hope it can feed you too.
Zoccola’s reimagining of Helen offers readers both an intimate character study and a sharp commentary on gender, agency and the mythic weight of expectation.
POETRY Helen of Troy, 1993
By Maria Zoccola
Scribner
Published January 14, 2025
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