Born and raised in Arizona, Diana Arterian is a poet, critic, translator, and editor who earned her PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. A poetry editor at Noemi Press and two-time finalist for the National Poetry Series, her creative work has been recognized with fellowships from the Banff Centre, Caldera, Millay Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. Arterian’s debut collection, Playing Monster :: Seiche, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was a Poetry Foundation staff pick. Her most recent collection is Agrippina the Younger: Poems (Northwestern University Press, 2025). Smoke Drifts: Selected Poems, her edited co-translations of the contemporary Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman, is forthcoming this fall from World Poetry Books. Arterian lives in Los Angeles and writes “The Annotated Nightstand” column at Lit Hub.
Diana Arterian’s Agrippina the Younger is dedicated to readers “who look” beyond “a handful of men [who] defined this woman’s life narrative” as: “Agrippina the Younger became the empress of Rome after tricking her uncle into marrying her and adopting her son. She murdered her uncle later.” By challenging the flattening of Agrippina as a monstrous conniving empress, Arterian brings complexity to the thoughts of a mother whose eyes “blink into hellebore buds” at her son Nero’s assassination attempts, even while acknowledging the material marital benefits of Agrippina’s successive marriages and her giving birth to Nero, with whom she shared power. There is an ambivalence in Arterian’s speaker, who “wishes to scratch at the meteorite’s little holes/ Though this union [between Nero’s father and the thirteen year-old Agrippina] is the requirement of her power.” “What is buried continues to surface,” Arterian writes. In this retelling, Agrippina “smiled/ with her mouth of bloody eyeteeth.”
Tiffany Troy: You begin the poetry collection with epigraphs by Solmaz Sharif and Tacitus and the Julian-Claudian family tree. How do you feel this framing works?
Diana Arterian: Because Agrippina is a person whose life took on epic proportions (to me), I wanted to point to that within these initial pages. The family tree shows this is a family matter, the many players. The epigraphs, both ancient and modern, illustrate that this is an ongoing discussion that will endure far beyond my lifetime.
Tacitus is a lauded historian whose Histories and Annals are undeniable resources to anyone hoping to learn about the Ancient Roman world and its political intrigues. Yet, crucially, Tacitus was writing a generation or two after the dramas of Empress Agrippina and her family he wrote so much about. So when I read “I am not inventing marvels. What I have told, and shall tell, is the truth,” I was stunned by the next sentence: “Older men heard and recorded it.” In the instant Tacitus hoped to convey his credibility, he instead revealed his—and, arguably, the world’s—bias. I’m sure older men heard and recorded it, I thought. That’s the whole problem. Men recorded what they thought was truth (though also not!), and thus began an increasingly flimsy daisy chain of knowledge people continue to consider absolute. This flawed and misogynist business is what drove me to write this book.
Solmaz Sharif’s line “History is a kind of study” is in a poem about extreme power differentials, authority, policing, womanhood, psychology, and violence. While these may not feel like a perfect overlay to the themes of Agrippina the Younger, it instantly rang a bell inside. I take Sharif’s meaning to be that history operates like a scientific study in what it reveals about humanity—or it can be scrutinized in such a way as to give hard information. But also her line felt like a summons. I wanted “study” to be a defining verb, my work with this history and the archive to be probing, inquisitive, and fuzzy. To look at something with curiosity and humility rather than a sense of certainty about what I might learn.
The family tree was inspired, I’m now realizing, by One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, a book I read not long after college (if there was ever an example of how literature can linger in the mind!). As I read, I found myself flipping back to the enormous family tree to trace the characters who shared names through the generations. I’m sure there are dissertation chapters about why Márquez had everyone bear the same names as their ancestors, but it’s hard not to think that he may be referencing Ancient Roman habits. As I was writing my poems, I soon scribbled a tree out for myself to keep track of everyone in a family that had maddeningly similar names even within the same generation (“Claudia the Elder” and “Claudia the Younger” could be sisters). So the family tree is, I hope, a resource.
TT: Turning the page to the eponymous poem, “Agrippina the Younger”: what first sparked your interest in and journey to render Agrippina in lyric form? How does the poem give way to the poems that follow?
DA: The fact her son the Emperor Nero had her assassinated is likely enough to make almost anyone want to learn more. One particular version of Agrippina’s murder found its way to me and would not let me go (this is something about which I went into detail in an essay I wrote for Lit Hub). In this first poem, which was the first one I wrote about Agrippina, I wanted to lean into the absurdity of her tale—to point to how the historians warped her narrative into one of a monstrous and destructive woman. Of course I think that is purposefully reductive about a person who felt she was worthy of holding power despite living in a time and place in which she was legally a second-class citizen. The historians slandered her again and again to make such a person a cautionary tale, at best. I hope the first poem conveys the wildness that swirls around Agrippina and makes the reader want to look closer. I do think of this book as a long poem, an epic built from discrete pieces—and Agrippina is certainly as deserving of an epic as anyone. This first poem is meant to be a push down the rabbit hole.
TT: What was your journey in writing this epic long poem? How did you land on the poem’s four overarching sections, with quotes that meld different worlds (Robin Coste Lewis, H.D., and Trisha Low quoting her grandmother on Wu Zetian)?
DA: Over the decade it took to write this book, many things happened to me, to the world, to poetry, to art. Subsequently, many things happened to this book. I realized I needed to be a primary character, for one. This allowed for insights into how the life of a political genius of two thousand years ago thrashing against misogynist systems matters today, now. And who was I? Why did I care? Why does anyone still care about this family? All of these are questions that, I think, give the poems more nuance and vitality.
The epigraphs that begin each part of the book point to the different concerns of the collection. “What can History possibly say?” is from Lewis’ poem “Felicité” about what was, for her, an unspeakable fact in her own family history. I take her question to mean: How can we contend with our inheritances? Can we withstand the horrors they contain? Did we think history would be a comfort? While it is a personal inquiry for Lewis, it felt like an enormous, terrifying, public, and perhaps unanswerable question I was probing as I wrote about Agrippina. I also quoted H.D.’s Modernist masterpiece Helen in Egypt, which reconsiders the ancient myths of The Iliad that continue to stalk the edges of Western imagination. In her poem, she gives Helen space for personhood and self-actualization (hopefully the kinship between Helen and Agrippina is clear). The idea that a woman “must fight by stealth,/ with invisible gear” is an ancient schema imposed on those who wanted more than a hemmed in life stitched by social thought. Finally, Empress Wu Zetian was someone who began as an emperor’s concubine and ended up the only woman sovereign in China’s history. While in power, she did remarkable work to dispel judicial corruption, expand China’s borders, and support its arts and economy. Trisha Low’s quotation about Wu Zetian illustrated to me that women like Agrippina have existed all over the world and across time. The sense of restriction Low’s grandmother describes is so clear—that it can feel like dumb luck this remarkable politician ended up in power rather than “Starving to death in someone’s tomb” because of her gender. Agrippina also could have easily died in exile or been married off, disappearing into the margins of history. That this is knowledge passed down from a woman elder (Low’s grandmother), of course, makes it all that much more potent.
The three sections in the book where these epigraphs fall are meant to give a sense of pacing in Agrippina’s life. The very short first section, I hope, creates a sense of building, like the clicking as a rollercoaster tugs you up. Those three poems say “buckle up” and simultaneously deliver the registers the book will take: fantastical, ancient, fact-laden, lineated verse as well as hybrid prose poems. The other two sections come at pivotal events: at the birth of Nero, and Agrippina’s ascension to the imperial throne. I wanted the reader to hover over these crucial moments. Nero will be Agrippina’s means to real, near-total power over the empire. (Once he is emperor, Agrippina will use Nero as a puppet, set up a hidden door to the Senate to listen in and to make informed political decisions.) But for that to happen, she first needed to become empress and her emperor husband adopt Nero, putting him next in line. These weren’t necessarily calculated on Agrippina’s part—she could hardly predict giving birth to a son—but she brilliantly exploited the windfalls when they came.
TT: For those curious, what was the process like in engaging with primary (writings, artifacts, as well as historical sites/ruins) and secondary sources (movies that include Agrippina) that carry their own biases and perspectives concerning Agrippina? In “The Tiber,” you write, “One modern historian states, The sources need to be seen as texts that have a clear agenda. I encounter again and again the fraught reality of writing based on these biased texts.” What do you feel your role is, then, as a poet?
DA: There were periods when writing this book when I felt confident I could delineate what the historians invented whole cloth or were based on real events. Then I might come across a sentence that unraveled that certainty! In short: the process was maddening. I learned I had to approach this history, including the museums and ancient sites, with suspicion. This is not to say experts aren’t trustworthy (hardly the line I want to give at a time when expertise is so under attack). But the ancient historians and curators, and even some modern counterparts, have not done Agrippina any favors—quite the opposite. They offer up a minute, warped version of her life again and again. Then, invariably, there are novels and films and television series that are based on the faulty narrative. It’s like playing a game of telephone over many centuries—and the original utterance was a misogynist lie.
Because I’m a lover—not an expert—of history, I felt more comfortable following impulses and curiosities without the terror of misrepresenting something or hitting the edge of my expertise (a fear I know well as a scholar). My role was to document and inquire—not only the history but also myself and humanity at large. We’re at a terrifying moment worldwide in which there is an accelerated and pointed enterprise of forgetting. Violent revisionist history has become more prevalent as more experts—through new technologies, discoveries, and interpretations—complicate the white supremacist and misogynist narratives we have been fed for centuries. The backlash is hardly a coincidence. The more those who actively want to harm the vulnerable lean into this exploit, the more tightly I cling to my role as an artist and thinker whose task is to document, complicate, and agitate.
I often think of a James Baldwin quotation as an invocation: “Artists are here to disturb the peace.” Baldwin didn’t necessarily mean the peace of the political status quo, but rather how we exist in the world and the lies we have to tell ourselves to survive, the existential terrors we lullaby dormant. The task of the artist is to lock their eyes on those terrors—and not look away. Poets have been doing that longer than most.
TT: The idea of the poet as the gaze-fixer to the lullaby dormant-existential terrors is fascinating. In “The Augustan Sanctuary and Residential Complex,” you write: “I am sick over the fact that Agrippina wrote three memoirs during her exile from Rome by Nero. They described her life and the lives of each of her parent’s families. These memories disappeared in the chaos of time. One historian calls this one of the saddest losses of classical literature.” You continue, “I don’t know who said this. Maybe it’s no one. Maybe it’s me.” So in some ways, the poet is re-creating myth through these anecdotes.
Related to that, in “Addendum—Livilla’s Urn,” you write, “The poor likely made speeches of love, but there is no record there.” How do you contend with the lack or chasms in the historical record in Agrippina the Younger?
DA: My limitations while researching this history were clear to me from the outset. First and foremost, I don’t read Latin (I could have learned much more if I did). The clarion call of this book, I hope, is to show the flaws of history without diminishing its importance. I cherish archives and literature and history. I also realize everything that has been preserved represents innumerable omissions. The “chasms” are what need our attention, if only to illustrate how our predecessors kicked people out of history. Archives show these violences in their gaps.
The quotation you provide points to that fact. No one wrote down what the poor ancient Romans said over the dead because the poor didn’t matter much to the historians and people of note. As with women, the poor, disabled, queer, enslaved, and any other group of people systematically crushed by the powerful in society have largely been erased throughout time the world over. I know about Agrippina because she was from a noble family and an empress. Her written life is distorted, but at least we have something. Yet, most important, her appearances in history, as meager as they are, represent the millions of women who were given no place at all.
TT: In the writing of the collection, did each poem find its way to a form, or vice versa? You braid dense prose poems that look at artifacts and ruins that are in orderly monostiches, couplets or triplet forms. What are your influences in landing upon the forms?
DA: In general, the lineated verse I pen is spare and exacting. Those ragged-right-edge poems that give scenes from Agrippina’s life are aiming for concision (even if a detail took hours of reading to pin down). The prose poems came later when I realized I needed to consider creative texts inspired by Agrippina and her family—and my role in all of this should be explicit in the text. The messiness of that, along with the boundless information I encountered and how vexing it all felt, didn’t fit into what you aptly call “orderly” poems. In short: where the lineated poems allowed a kind of laser focus, the prose poems could be expansive. There’s only so much laser intensity one can sustain—whether in reading or writing. Because these look quite different on the page, I hope the shift from ancient (lineated poem) to modern (hybrid prose) isn’t a jolt, but rather something the reader can register before they even take in the first word.
The biggest influences for this book are Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal (which I talked to Diana Khoi Nguyen about over at BOMB) and Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Kapil employs different types of poetic forms and media in the collection, jumping between the early twentieth century and the present. Ondaatje seesaws between tight poems to prose and ephemera, which I had begun to do but was unsure about—seeing his intellectual and creative power showed me I was on the right track. In terms of the nitty gritty on a line level, CAConrad’s Book of Frank taught me the power of space to put pressure on a word or a line. Gwendolyn Brooks illustrates time and again how diction can deliver a muscular wallop. My rhythms certainly draw from Alice Notley and her acolytes, like Shane McCrae. In terms of the prose poems, the personal yet incisive hybrid writings of Toi Derricotte, Maggie Nelson, and Roland Barthes showed me how a quotation can light up an idea, newly. All are buoys in the choppy waters of work such as this.
TT: For those who are not familiar with Humananimal, what are some parallels and differences between Kapil’s project and your own, less in terms of subject matter but more in terms of the valences between the speaker/poet and the historical women they describe? Through mimetics, what do you wish to get out of the “ghost book,” a book that your mentor Maggie Nelson describes as one “that secretly—or not so secretly, as the case may be—stands behind my book, not just as its muse, but often as its literal stylistic and/or structural model” in the BOMB interview with Nguyen?
DA: My sense, for Kapil, is that her investigation of the “feral wolf girls” Kamala and Amala was a way for Kapil to consider adult-child relationships, power dynamics, oppression, and vulnerability that often defines our youth (among many other things, including archives, Orientalism, and haunting). Rather than an invisible figure who delivered knowledge or insights, Kapil was a central character in the book, moving through the world. This was crucial to me as a model. It splintered open the strictures I had imposed on myself—that I wasn’t allowed to exist in Agrippina. While I’m not sure it was explicit mimesis, there is a hearty amount of overlap in our approaches. Kapil also gives poetic scenes she imagines based on the information she learns. She finds connective tissue between these girls and herself. She moves through the historical spaces she has researched and read about. One friend recently said she felt like this approach—to convey research and meditation and encounter in this way—is an example of a feminist epistemology in its sense of wandering curiosity rather than drilling down into a single concept. I do feel a kinship to that notion (though W.G. Sebald certainly beat Kapil and myself to it).
TT: What are you working on today?
DA: I’m gearing up to promote my forthcoming co-translation Smoke Drifts, the selected works of the contemporary Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman (which I did with Marina Omar). The incredible poet and novelist Aria Aber wrote the introduction, a total honor. Like Agrippina the Younger, Smoke Drifts has been many years in the making, and I’m excited it is finally coming out this fall.
In terms of my pen on the page, I’ve finished something. As a child, I was a serious classical violinist but had to stop—severe repetitive motion injuries required surgery. Almost two decades later, my mother suffered a debilitating stroke. We both cared for each other in meaningful ways during a period defined by terror over our physical states and the murkiness of what lay ahead. I recently completed a draft of a multi-modal memoir that attends to these experiences. The “multi-modal” element is the periodic chapters that provide sweeping (and hopefully even fun) histories on healthcare practices that impacted us—like the history of surgery, say, or emergency medicine.
I’m also co-translating the Armenian poet Silva Kaputikyan with the translator Margarit Ordukhanyan. Kaputikyan is arguably the most important Armenian poet of the last century (Kaputikyan wrote a Soviet-era poem so revered Margarit had to learn it by heart in her Armenian grade school). Kaputikyan’s 20th century was defined by upheaval, as Armenia was a member of the USSR and the state’s dissolution was fraught. She wrote poems nearly up to her death in 2006 (her oeuvre is enormous—over sixty books!). In terms of my verse, I’m trying to write poems of a very different kind. These pieces are less determined in their approach, instead meeting bodily experience and existential inquiry in a way more like feeling along a wall in the dark. I’m terrified I don’t know what I’m doing, which feels like a good sign.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world?
It’s a lovely thought people across the world might read my work! One of my most meaningful shifts in the wake of this book is I now actively pursue a sense of deep time. Standing in front of a tree that has stood for thousands of years, looking at an ancient mosaic made by artful hands long gone, as examples, helps me fight the feeling of our modern moment’s importance. Our lives are, of course, defined by immediacy, our pains and joys of the spirit that blare like a fire alarm. Yet our lifetimes, even if we’re lucky, are starkly brief in the grand scheme of things. This terrifying truth can trigger an existential crisis or, ideally, a grander sense of connection to humans throughout the ages.
I hesitate to say “things are better than they once were.” It’s clear this nation has passed a tipping point (something felt the world over). People still live lives defined by oppression and precarity and terror. And yet, looking at the incessant news cycle that defines our days, it’s hard to remember we are living in a time in which there is less war and enslavement and out-in-out brutality than there has ever been in the history of the world. For tens of thousands of years, across the globe, life was cheap. People have fought for centuries to enshrine people’s humanity and their right to live with dignity. We are actively questioning the oppressive systems that have been in place for millennia. These gains are perilously hard-won. Considering the instability of today, I don’t know how to ensure these projects continue. Yet, like many, I strive to support vulnerable people, known and unknown to me. I’m also trying to remember my life is fleeting, and how quickly the world can change. I hold out hope—not for salvation from what has happened, but when I consider how far we’ve come. Of course the fight never ends.