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.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this 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

Affect

Philosophy
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

Affect refers to emotional experience or intensity prior to conscious interpretation. It emphasises feeling as a primary mode of engagement with the world.

Detailed Definition
In contemporary philosophy, affect describes pre-reflective emotional forces that shape perception and behaviour. In poetry, affect is central to how language evokes mood and sensation beyond rational explanation. Poets harness rhythm, sound, and imagery to transmit affective states directly, allowing readers to feel before they fully understand, thus deepening the immediacy of poetic experience.
Example
Example in poetry:
Spinoza's concept of affect — the capacity to act and be acted upon — has profoundly influenced contemporary poets like Claudia Rankine, whose "Citizen" tracks the affective injuries of racism as they accumulate in the body and the civic space; In classical rhetoric and poetics, affect referred to the emotional states a poem was designed to produce, and Horace's dictum "aut prodesse aut delectare" acknowledges that poetry operates through affective as well as rational channels; Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of affect — distinguishing it from personal emotion as a pre-personal intensity — has inspired Language poets to explore how sound, rhythm, and syntax produce affective states independent of semantic content; Wordsworth's theory of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility" is a phenomenology of affect — the raw affective charge of experience is processed and transformed into the measured affect of the poem; A poet writing about depression might use the philosophical concept of affect (the dulling or blocking of affect in clinical states) to explore how illness reorganizes one's capacity to be moved by the world; Sylvia Plath's poetry is often read through the lens of affect theory, examining how her verse performs the intensities of grief, rage, and joy as bodily and psychic forces rather than merely personal confessions
Additional Notes
Affect theory draws on Spinoza's distinction between affects (affectus) — the increases and decreases in a body's power to act — and emotions, which are the personal, conscious interpretations of those affective states. Deleuze and Guattari develop this into a philosophy of pre-personal intensities: affect is what happens before the subject has organized experience into named emotions. Brian Massumi's work has been particularly influential in connecting Spinozan affect theory to cultural and aesthetic analysis. For poets, affect theory opens a space between sensation and emotion, between the body's response and the mind's interpretation — a space that poetry, through rhythm, sound, and image, is uniquely equipped to inhabit. Affect differs from emotion in being transpersonal and in existing at the threshold of the conscious and the somatic. Related terms: emotion, intensity, sensation, Spinoza's conatus, Deleuze's plane of immanence.
Also Known As
Emotion
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