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

Anagram

Constraint
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 word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of another word or phrase.

Explore this topic in depth (1)

The Sestina — A sestina is built from six end-words that return in a changing order across six stanzas and a brief closing envoi. Its pattern can look daunting on paper, but it is best understood as an audible cycle: familiar words arriving in new emotional and grammatical surroundings.

Detailed Definition
An anagram is a literary device where the letters of a word or phrase are rearranged to form a new expression, often revealing hidden meanings or playful associations; in poetry, anagrams function as formal constraints that challenge poets to work within strict lexical boundaries, fostering ingenuity and layered interpretation—historically used by poets like John Donne and in modern Oulipian experiments to explore identity, transformation, and linguistic instability through constrained permutation.
Example
Example in poetry:
In “The Anagram” by David Shulman, “Washington Crossing the Delaware” is rearranged into a coherent sentence; Lewis Carroll created anagrams of friends’ names as poetic gifts; Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” contains the anagram “Amleth” from Scandinavian legend; poet Vladimir Nabokov used anagrams in “Pale Fire” for hidden character identities; “A Santa at NASA” is a palindrome-anagram often used in constrained verse; Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” includes subtle anagrammatic echoes like “Ich, ich, ich, ich” rearranging German pronouns.
Additional Notes
Anagrams rearrange all letters of a word or phrase to form a new one, often with thematic resonance. In constrained poetry, anagrams can structure entire poems (e.g., David Shulman’s famous Washington crossing anagram) or serve as hidden messages. The Oulipo group revived anagrammatic play as serious compositional method. Tips for students: start with short phrases, use digital tools cautiously, and aim for semantic connection between original and anagram. Anagrams relate to permutation, logogriphs, and acrostics—all forms of linguistic recombination that foreground the materiality of language.
Also Known As
Wordplay transposal Permutation
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