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

Alloy

Craft Terms
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

An alloy is a poem made stronger or stranger by combining different linguistic or formal materials.

Detailed Definition
An alloy may blend colloquial speech with ceremonial cadence, inherited form with free verse, or personal memory with archival language. The combined material should alter each component, not merely place unlike samples side by side. An alloyed poem can express mixed identity, cultural contact, or conflicting systems of knowledge. Its success depends on proportion and heat: too little integration feels pasted together, while too much erases the differences whose friction gives the poem its strength.
Example
Example in poetry:
An alloy combines unlike materials, and an alloyed poem may mix formal diction with street speech; A sonnet that joins scientific vocabulary to a love lyric creates an alloy of intellectual and emotional registers; Walt Whitman’s long catalogues can be read as an alloy of democratic speech, biblical rhythm, and personal meditation; Pairing a rigid rhyme scheme with conversational interruptions makes a poem’s voice feel deliberately alloyed
Additional Notes
An alloy poem gains its character by joining unlike materials, such as colloquial speech with formal diction, archival language with lyric imagery, or strict meter with free verse. The combination may create productive friction rather than smooth uniformity. To use this technique well, identify what each material contributes and control the transitions between them. The parts should interact, not simply appear side by side. Related concepts include hybridity, collage, code-switching, juxtaposition, and mixed form. Consider whether the joining reveals a tension that a single style could not express.
Also Known As
Mixture Blend
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