In the first section of his Feb. 5 Contemporary Poetry Colloquium talk, “Making Contact: On Phatic Poetics,” Kamran Javadizadeh, associate professor of English at Villanova University, considered an enjambed line in James Schuyler’s poem “What”:

Oh, for someone to
talk small talk with.

In his next section, “on small talk,”  he brought on screen linguist Roman Jakobson’s schema of “factors inalienably involved in verbal communication,” with Javadizadeh’s annotations to model the idea of phatic poetics — poetry concerned with making contact.

Javadizadeh’s talk culminated with close examination of subtle instances of what he termed “the presence of absence” — Lucille Clifton’s “My Wife” from Next (1987), and John Ashbery’s “This Room,” from Your Name Here (2000). Javadizadeh had brought along a recording of Ashbery reading his lines, and the room listened.

Javadizadeh’s book Institutionalized Lyric is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.