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-through-words

Concept
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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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

Poetry that achieves real-world effects through its verbal expression

Detailed Definition
Action-through-words is a poetic technique where the language itself enacts or performs the action it describes, making the poem a dynamic event rather than a static description; this approach aligns with performative utterance theory, where saying something makes it so—e.g., “I name this ship” not only states but performs the naming—and in poetry, verbs, syntax, and rhythm conspire to embody motion, transformation, or ritual.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Shakespeare’s “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war,” the words themselves enact violent action; Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” uses the buzzing sound to perform the moment of death; Whitman’s “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world” enacts proclamation through utterance; Hughes’ “Hold fast to dreams / For if dreams die…” uses imperative language to urge action through speech.
Additional Notes
Action-through-words refers to poetry that enacts real-world change or performs a function simply by being spoken or written (e.g., vows, curses, blessings); rooted in J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory, it blurs the line between language and deed.
Also Known As
Performative utterance poetic enactment linguistic action speech-act verse Illocutionary poem
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