A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter A

Action Painting

Art
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A style that emphasizes spontaneous, energetic gestures in making an artwork.

Detailed Definition
Action painting treats the act of making as part of the finished work, preserving drips, strokes, splashes, and accidents as evidence of motion. In poetry, it can describe writing driven by impulse, rapid association, or physical arrangement on the page. A poem influenced by action painting may value velocity, interruption, and the visible trace of revision over polished narrative resolution.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poet may use action painting as a model for a poem made of urgent, splashing verbs, as if each line were thrown onto the page; A free verse poem about grief can imitate Jackson Pollock's action painting by layering broken images without a fixed narrative; Frank O'Hara's energetic, improvisational city poems can help students see how swift perception resembles action painting; Write a poem in which the speaker moves across the page through dashes, leaps, and sudden line breaks, treating language as physical paint
Additional Notes
Action painting values movement, chance, energy, and the visible trace of the artist’s gesture; Jackson Pollock is a key example. In poetry, it can suggest splashing syntax, spontaneous marks, or a speaker physically involved in making meaning. Contrast careful representation or still-life description. Study hint: describe the process, motion, and texture of paint, not only the finished image.
Also Known As
Gestural Painting Gestural Abstraction
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