Helen, Writer of Her Own Myth

Nic Cavell reviews Maria Zoccola’s “Helen of Troy, 1993.”

By Nic CavellJanuary 15, 2025

• Poetry

• Cultural Studies

• Gender & Sexuality

EURIPEDES’S THE TROJAN WOMEN focuses a chorus of woe on the wrongdoing of Helen of Troy, whose “opulent appetites” led a generation of men to their deaths and left the women who mourned them to unimaginable fates: she was a “hell for cities, burning hell for homes.” After the war, Helen herself returns to the throne of Sparta unscathed. In the afterword to her new collection, Helen of Troy, 1993, Maria Zoccola offers this reading of Euripides’s play and confesses her initial revulsion at Helen. As the world seemed to be ending in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoccola began work on a series of poems embodying the personae of all the sympathetic women in the Iliad, from Iphigenia, who was sacrificed for favorable wind, to Cassandra, whose prophecies were never believed. But Helen’s influence “lurked” beneath Zoccola’s whole project. That is, until Helen herself walked off the page and took over the voice of the collection.

The Helen that Zoccola conjures belongs to 1990s Tennessee, which Zoccola experienced as a child, yet as Zoccola writes in her afterword, she is “still unique, set apart, special—but not special enough to watch the tide of history turn on the axis of her body. Instead, she must turn herself, and allow history to fall around her like snow.” Helen’s voice is full yet thwarted, her youthful glory faded as a housewife whose daily errands consist of going to the grocery store and the bank. Zoccola wrote her first seven Helen poems “in a kind of manic daze,” and from the opening of the collection, Helen impresses with narrative flair, as when she tells her own origin story:

          i was born from the shell of an egg my mother pushed
          from between her thighs, crouched on her hospital bed
          like a woman beating slips against a river rock, hollering […]
          for the state of tennessee to pull off
          its work gloves and hold her hand.

The collection is bound together with formal echoes of Helen’s history in myth, but most importantly with Helen’s scrappy determination to give voice to her own epic. In her telling, even the egg she is born in—that “holy cell”—emits a precocious echo of poetry when her mother holds it up to listen: “to her ears there came / a humming that kept its meter and kept its rhyme.” She is “a daughter birthed to song,” and throughout these poems, “the quill is scratching. you can hear it, / can’t you: a sound like the tapping of an egg-tooth.”

As that quill scratches ink onto the page, Helen’s story emerges. In the 1970s and ’80s, she grows up with a sister, Cly (Clytemnestra), and a football-player brother (Pollux), who rescues Helen after she is raped by the defensive tackle (Theseus). In “helen of troy meets the big cheese,” Helen captures the moment she sees her first husband (Menelaus, whom she calls the “Big Cheese”) with a Homeric simile:

          as in the dampest part of winter, when rain
                                        flushes down from a sky
          with spring growing in its eye like a cataract
          not yet thick enough to film,
          wetting branches already spongy with snowmelt
          and too old to bargain another year’s sap
                                            from the mother trunk,
          and the wind blows with sudden exclamation
          against the topmost bough,
                              and that bough tumbles down,
          knocking here and there and falling square against
          a second limb, snapping it from the tree,
          and both limbs
                                  —sopped with rot and soft with death—
          drop together to the pine needle core of the forest floor
          and lie one atop the other, unmoving and jointly locked,
          decomposing by turns—just so
          did i first lay eyes on him. just so did we begin.

The somber illustration of gravity depicts also the inevitability of their pairing. “[J]ust so,” Helen says, “did we begin.”

Helen adopts another Homeric feature, the catalog or list, in the poem that follows, “helen of troy catalogues her pregnancy cravings,” but Zoccola stuffs her epic devices with contemporary references such as the bloodlust of Smurfs on a cereal box. Filling out the contours of her violent tale, and echoing the tree limbs that club each other in the previous poem, she demands:

          get me birdseed and eggshells and shards of ice.
          i want to break something on my teeth. i want to crush
          it so fine the load goes down like abracadabra,
          alakazam, watch me make the whole thing disappear.

Zoccola gives several poems the shape of “golden shovels,” after the form introduced by the poet Terrance Hayes in his 2010 collection Lighthead. In Hayes’s original poem, “The Golden Shovel,” each word of Gwendolyn Brooks’s haunting 1959 classic “We Real Cool” becomes an end word in the same sequence they appear in the original poem—in fact, he uses all the words in her poem as end words twice. In the same spirit, Zoccola pulls directly from a single line of her source material—Robert Fagles’s translation of the Iliad—for each of her golden shovels. In the first of these, she transmutes Iliad Book 6, lines 408–09—“dear to me, bitch that I am, vicious, scheming— / horror to freeze the heart!”—into an epic proclamation in Tennessee-housewife-Helen’s ineffable voice: “you start off all bowl-cut tube-sock schoolhouse rock and end up a bitch, […] i was, i am, / i ever shall be, bitch-hood delivered by angels on high.”

Helen is miserable in her marriage, breaking the computer in an abortive attempt to seek solace in online chat rooms—and launching the station wagon into a “barrel roll” while driving alone in a poem whose lines hurtle along, mirroring Helen’s chasing of the sensation of speed. This incident is written up in the local newspaper, in which she sees herself translated into a soap opera trope: “the kind of girl you save.” Helen-as-writer records her visit to the hospital: “i touch my wild hair, / come away with shards of glass / the women missed.” Her lines are clipped, shards. But even in these pared lines, Helen flexes with bravado: “what a fuss, this phalanx of nurses.”

Interspersed between poems from Helen’s point of view are a series of poems in the voice of “the spartan women” that function as a chorus throughout the collection. Some of the strongest poems in the collection are Helen’s accounts of her affair with the “Stranger,” which are both intimate and oblique. In “about the affair,” for example, she captures the changing of the seasons, charts her passage into no-man’s land, and manages to evoke tenderness, all in the space of a few lines:

          it was always this way, for me. the blazing went on
          until the dark came, and the dark went on
          for much longer than that.

This kind of introspection offers us a wholly original Helen.

It is worth considering Zoccola’s developed Helen and contrapuntal Homeric themes alongside Emily Wilson’s accomplishments, translating the Iliad with a feminist lens. Wilson’s work has been hailed as groundbreaking, introducing contemporary cadences alongside skillful iambic pentameter, and opening room for new discussions about the role of women in the epic—all while prioritizing a fidelity to the original Greek. Zoccola’s project was born of an impulse to portray sympathetic female characters from an ancient crisis in an effort to restore a vision of justice to a contemporary epoch in crisis. Evolving into an unabashed vision of the interiority of the discounted woman at the center of the epic’s bloodletting, the poems embrace a feminist lens much like Wilson’s translation. While loosely retaining the Iliad’s formal structure, Zoccola  radically reimagines Helen’s persona in free verse, merging the classic heroine with the time and context of the poet’s own youth. At the same time, in her telling, Zoccola relates in her afterword, “there is no war brewing in Sparta, Tennessee, no ‘vast armada gathered, moored at Aulis, / freighted with slaughter bound for Priam’s Troy.’” Helen of Troy, 1993 asks us to examine the stakes of Helen’s position and decision outside the context of war: “Instead, this Tennessee town holds nothing more than an abandoned, powerless husband with no oath to call in, no army to revenge his humiliation.” This is a poem about the plight and power of being an American woman.  

Zoccola allows Helen’s voice and choices to introduce variations to the ancient narrative. Helen alone is the scribbling protagonist. A woman apart, she leaves her husband and returns to him of her own accord. Happiness doesn’t seem to be the object or result of either decision, and as she leaves the taxi that has once again deposited her in Sparta, she reflects: “i thought about our sputtering porch light, / how it would blind me, how it would shine / through my body in burning spears.” The porch light and burning spears prefigure the painful accumulation of self-knowledge, the fruit and experience of making one’s own choices. In another refusal to foreground the men in Helen’s story, even Paris’ choice to name Aphrodite the most beautiful of the goddesses becomes Helen’s choice in 1993. Three goddesses tempt her between the boxes they hold, but Helen, now in middle age, clashes with Aphrodite over who owns the rights to the box promising sex, which Helen believes the goddess has stolen from her.

In Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad, war becomes beautiful in Homer’s unsparing depictions of the savagery and gore of men’s machinations on and off the battlefield. In Zoccola’s 1993, another take on the Iliad, violence predominates but takes different forms. In a poem that comes early in the collection, for instance, the violent predilections of Helen’s suitors overwhelm the page. In “helen of troy is asked to the spring formal,” they end their bids in a chorus:

          come down to us, they howled to my window. we’ll pelt you like the
          forest fox. we’ll strip you clean, we’ll lick you raw. you’ll see why trees lie
          down for the axe.

In a steady voice, Helen notes the aftermath of her choice of suitors, the  “tangled hair and the marks along her hips where he bruised her.” She revises the fallout, putting a tongue-in-cheek spin on her abortion in the poem titled “helen of troy tells her mother it’s a graduation girls’ trip and drives alone to the clinic in nashville.” Later, when she meets the Big Cheese for the first time, the encounter is depicted in a simile of limbs rent from a tree—limbs that come to blows and finally settle in a “decomposing” heap on the forest floor below. In the next poem, “helen of troy catalogues her pregnancy cravings,” Helen wonders,

          who was that one wizard in salem
          they squashed to death in a tofu press,
          giles somebody, they just kept piling it on,
          and that sucker smiled his bluebird smile
          and asked for more.

The child will grow up to resent her mother’s hunger for experience, and Helen’s relationship with the Stranger will mark the family as a subject for gossip. Helen, however, has no interest in curbing her appetites or hiding her affair.

If Helen the speaker has one demand for her audience, it is for them to shut up and let her do the talking. Listen to me, she says. But there are moments when even Helen, eager to unburden herself, chooses silence. At a Chuck E. Cheese, holding her head high among the housewives, she loses track of her daughter and searches desperately:

          i really do think if i find her now 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’ll spill my guts after all right here in the middle of a rat-themed
          las vegas

Of course, when she finds the kid, she doesn’t “say any of those things whatsoever.” She sits with her daughter and enjoys a moment of solidarity: “she gives / me this little squiggle of mouth movement that’s not exactly / a smile but sort of could be in the right light.”

Below the title of “the end of the affair,” Zoccola lists Helen at Scaean Gate, the 1880s Gustave Moreau painting, as the inspiration for a poem in which the heroine ends her affair with the Stranger in a Perkins restaurant “beside the city walls.” In the painting, an enormous, shapely, faceless Helen stands at the smoking Trojan gate amid a pile of gore. In the poem, Helen recalls that the Stranger “lit a cigarette and passed it to [her].” She is once again ravenous: “i was so hungry / in my body […] the booth heaved / with plates of grease and blood.” But in this poem, near the collection’s end, hail begins to forcefully strike the walls of the Perkins, and Helen’s voraciousness abates. Our Helen’s hunger is finally satisfied only once she is no longer connected to the Stranger and can stand alone.

The miracle of the egg’s “humming that kept its meter and kept its rhyme” upon Helen’s birth was of no solace to her mother, who “knew enough to fear / a daughter birthed to song.” To the Big Cheese’s ears, “all [Helen’s] words straight and tidy” are “little soldiers on the march.” Zoccola’s Helen, resurrected in peacetime Tennessee, demands an audience for all “the ugliest and most beautiful parts” of her epic, and in the telling, she finds her voice. The final poem of the collection, “helen of troy plants near the mailbox,” is a golden shovel, and the last words from each of its 19 lines can be strung together to form Helen’s prophecy in lines 424–26 of Book 6 of Fagles’s Iliad, in which Zoccola has replaced “Zeus” with “God”: “God planted a killing doom within us both, / so even for generations still unborn / we will live in song.” By making a new poem out of these traditional lines, Zoccola remakes Helen: a new woman who thrives in spite of neglect.