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

almost-rhythmic

Sound
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 poetic phrasing that evokes a sense of rhythm without strictly adhering to a metrical pattern, creating a near-regular cadence that simulates natural speech, prose rhythm, or incantatory effect.

Detailed Definition
Almost-rhythmic describes verse that approaches regular metrical patterns without fully committing to them, hovering between free verse and formal meter. This semi-rhythmic quality creates an effect of controlled irregularity, where readers perceive an underlying rhythmic impulse without being able to identify a consistent metrical scheme. Almost-rhythmic verse can suggest order while maintaining freedom, allowing poets to evoke traditional forms while resisting their constraints, producing a tension between regularity and variation.
Example
Example in poetry:
Free verse by Walt Whitman often feels almost-rhythmic—pulsing with cadence but resisting strict meter; Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” uses breath-based phrasing that approximates but never locks into regular rhythm; contemporary poet Tracy K. Smith employs almost-rhythmic lines to mirror conversational speech; the Psalms in Hebrew poetry use parallelism that creates an almost-rhythmic effect without metrical feet; almost-rhythmic verse appears in spoken word where emphasis shifts with performance
Additional Notes
almost-rhythmic describes a style of verse that intentionally moves close to, but does not fully commit to, a consistent metrical pattern or rhythm, often aiming for a more natural, prose-like, or conversational sound while retaining a structured feel.
Also Known As
Near-rhythmic Semi-rhythmic Quasi-metrical Cisrhythmic
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