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

alphabet poem variant

Form
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

A poetic form based on the alphabet but modified in structure, sequence, or execution from the standard abecedarian model.

Detailed Definition
Alphabet poem variant encompasses various poetic forms that use alphabetic organization as a structural principle, including alphabet acrostics, alpha-poems, abecedarius, and other alphabetically-sequenced compositions. These variants differ in how strictly they adhere to alphabetic order, whether the alphabetic element appears at line beginnings or elsewhere, and whether all twenty-six letters must appear. The common thread is using the alphabet as an organizing framework for poetic content and structure.
Example
Example in poetry:
Rather than A-to-Z order, a variant might organize stanzas under B, D, P, and T, letters chosen for their percussive sounds; a poem about migration could use M, O, V, E as four section-headings, with each letter advancing the subject; “Q” may appear alone as a brief stanza, its rarity making it a visual and sonic interruption; an alphabet poem variant can proceed Z-to-A, making reverse order suggest undoing, aging, or return; selecting letters from a loved one’s name turns alphabetic structure into a portrait rather than a recitation
Additional Notes
alphabet poem variant is any deviation from the basic structure of an alphabetic poem (where lines or stanzas are ordered by the letters of the alphabet); variations can involve skipping letters, using words beginning with the letter, or using the alphabet as a thematic organizing principle.
Also Known As
Alphabetic variant Letter-sequence poem Variant abecedarius
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