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

Anarchy

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

Anarchy refers to the absence of governing authority or imposed order. It can signify chaos or a critique of hierarchical structures.

Detailed Definition
Philosophically, anarchy challenges the necessity of authority, proposing alternative forms of organisation or freedom. In poetry, it appears as rebellion against formal, social, or linguistic constraints. Poets may adopt fragmented structures or subversive tones to reflect anarchic impulses, questioning systems of power and exploring the creative potential of disorder.
Example
Example in poetry:
Shelley's "The Mask of Anarchy," written after the Peterloo Massacre, uses anarchy philosophically not as mere chaos but as the condition that precedes genuine political freedom — "Ye are many, they are few" invokes a positive philosophical anarchism; Whitman's democratic poetics enact a philosophical anarchism in form — the long, unruly lines refusing metrical authority — while the content celebrates the individual's sovereignty against institutional constraint; The Dadaist poets embraced anarchy as a philosophical principle, using chance operations and nonsense to undermine the authority of rational discourse and aesthetic convention; A poet engaging with Kropotkin's philosophical anarchism might write lyrics celebrating mutual aid over competition, using natural imagery (ants, mycelium, flocking birds) to argue that cooperation is nature's own anarchist principle; Language poetry's dismantling of syntactic norms and lyric authority can be read as a philosophical anarchism applied to grammar and poetic convention, treating every received rule as a site of potential resistance; Rimbaud's "A Season in Hell" enacts philosophical anarchy in its assault on every convention — moral, aesthetic, linguistic — performing the anarchy of a self determined to make itself absolutely free
Additional Notes
Philosophical anarchism (distinct from political anarchism as a social movement) is the view that there is no legitimate political authority — no state has the right to demand obedience merely by virtue of being a state. This position was developed by Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, among others, and it draws on deeper philosophical claims about the nature of freedom and the illegitimacy of coercion. Epistemological anarchism (Feyerabend's "anything goes") extends the principle to the philosophy of science, arguing that no single method has privileged status. For poetry, anarchy has both formal and political dimensions: the free verse revolution was implicitly anarchist (no metrical authority), while political anarchist poetry challenges the state's claim to define the boundaries of legitimate speech. Related terms: freedom, authority, legitimacy, Kropotkin's mutual aid, Godwin, Proudhon.
Also Known As
absence of rule stateless liberty spontaneous order
Skip to main content