Keep this Forever Book

I did "like" it, I did. A few of the poems I really liked (the father poems esp.). But the self-consciousness, which is embraced, denied, subsumed, chastised, transferred (to the reader), is distracting, annoying at times. Like watching actors on stage is if, like me, you can never get over the fact that they're acting. Sometimes I just want to read a good, disenfranchised poem about a tree. But sometimes I really like playing along with Halliday.

What strikes me most, however, are the odd similarities between the "play" of Joshua Clover and the "play" of Halliday, since Halliday just wrote this big, provocative diatribe in Pleiades against Clover (whom I like quite a bit). (Read the essay here )

E.G.:

"Aunt Emily asks Binx to take Kate to watch a parade
Rheinhardt and Geraldine sing hymns during windstorm at the
breakwater
Billy visits Kato on impulse, Kato speaks of the cop she's
dating
Wesley meets Wanita and pulls a leeach off her leg at the
creek"

Now, who is that? Clover or Halliday?

It's Halliday, and I would assume those more familiar with Halliday's work in sum may be quickly able to make the distinction (and I'm not doing justice to the poem from which I take the stanza, "Plot Notes," which unfolds using repetition and a refrain, and is not representative, generally, but these are comments on a social networking site, not The Literary Review . . . NEVERTHELESS,) My point is:

There are obvious similarities between the two poets, which may help to explain the energy Halliday was able to muster to so thoroughly scourge Clover and his school (whatever that school is (I'm not sure)). I don't think Halliday is in any way jealous of Clover's poety (maybe his eternally hip, grad-school-student nature, but who isn't), I think the argument simply means an awful lot to him, that the stakes on which he bases his poetic practice are jeopardized by Clover's distance(?), his post-urbaneness(?), the general fact that I feel the need to add (?) to my characterizations of him (i.e. his slipperiness)--

Something complicated is going on, both in Halliday's poetry and in his criticism, and in Clover, and in the intersections between these schools and poets, etc., and what excites me is this might be a conflict that is actually productive rather than one that disintegrates into camp rivalry.