Joe Milford, my brother thick as the worst war, wrote this second piece of The Southern Collective Experience with The Copperhead Arts & Literary Review in mind specifically. This life is good faith, a baseball bat, silver-tongued vocabulary, and enough voo-doo to get you through a few winters Being southern means living with a constant irony of guilt--from colonization, slavery, civil unrest, and genocide--and hope--from gospel, the forest, the bounty of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, and the music. Although the term “copperhead” implies danger and poison, I think that it also implies survival and primal nature—these snakes are pit vipers, which means they usually avoid combat and use ambush to secure their prey—I think art can be a lot like this—whether poetry, prose, photography, painting, music, etc.—art can ambush and surprise you and then ultimately consume you. There was an anti-war contingent, north of the Ohio River, known as the Copperheads, during Civil War times, and they are extremely controversial and not at all associated with my idea behind the journal’s title—rather, the animal itself seemed regal and austere to me as I was always taught to respect snakes, especially ones like a copperhead who could be totally invisible in leaves and red Georgia clay, as a boy who loved playing in the woods. I also began to form an abstract idea behind the word “copperhead”—as if it implied a mind emanating or encased with precious metals or an aspect of wealth or electrical conductivity—the Hermes helmet, so to speak—the messenger or creatrix delivering the particular muse of choice. This may be stretching it a bit, but for me, the association was there—if you are a “copperhead”, you have the disease—you are enamored of art, of creating art, of experiencing art, of appreciating art—you’ve been ambushed by the snake, and subsequently bitten. This journal may have its sensibilities rooted in the ideas of “Southern”, and that is something which is constantly evolving—just considering that the capital city of my state, Atlanta, was once burned down during a war to abolish slavery—a place where African-Americans did not yet have a voice—is now a place where rap and hip-hop artists run a small empire is a testament to this meteoric change. However, this journal transcends https://youtube/watch?v=HVXnLC3NnXg
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 13:37:02 +0000
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