James Mann

Tombstone Confidential James Mann

Tombstone Confidential is a satire on mortality and contemporary culture, grounded in today's ingrained disregard for the relatively imminent approach and finality of one's death. An essentially comic work, at the same time the book is one long memento mori, filling a loosely narrative framework sequenced as a wandering journey across the United States. The poem unfolds panoramically through a wide variety of setting and reference, as it embodies the aesthetic position set forth by the author's Manifesto of Vandalism: that in today's diverse and chaotic culture, the most competent and valuable art will be that which makes the fullest and richest use of the entire range of culture at all levels.

With 10,000 lines of rhymed pentameter quatrains, Tombstone Confidential offers an individual reconstitution of the art of poetry. From beginning to end, the book is addressed in the second person to a fictive reader, whose mock persona thus becomes the clueless protagonist of the narrative. The implied speaker of the poem is equally problematic, serving as the rambling yet relentless accuser of the reader's fictional life of ignorance and crime. With a doppelganger leitmotif, the action turns from hell to Hollywood, from national parks to space exploration, from Thunder Road to Las Vegas, the Wild West to the Rolling Stones, vampire culture to cannibalism, sports to sex, the Blue Ridge to the Golden Gate.