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

Assemblage

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

Assemblage refers to a collection of diverse elements that come together to form a whole. It emphasises multiplicity and dynamic relationships.

Detailed Definition
In contemporary philosophy, especially Deleuze and Guattari, assemblage describes systems formed by heterogeneous parts interacting without fixed hierarchy. In poetry, this appears in collage-like structures, juxtaposition, and intertextual layering. Poets create meaning through the interaction of fragments, reflecting the complexity and fluidity of modern experience.
Example
Example in poetry:
Deleuze and Guattari's concept of assemblage — a multiplicity of heterogeneous elements that form a provisional whole without hierarchy — has directly influenced poets like Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson, whose works assemble fragments, genres, and discourses into hybrid forms; Whitman's catalogues can be reread through assemblage theory as a democratic gathering of diverse elements — people, objects, landscapes — that form a collective body without subordinating any element to a master term; Collage poetry (the Cantos of Pound, the cut-up experiments of Burroughs, the procedural texts of Language poetry) enacts assemblage philosophically, treating the poem as a temporary gathering of heterogeneous materials rather than an organic unity; A poet creating a documentary poem about a historical event might frame their method in terms of assemblage — gathering testimony, archival material, lyric meditation, and visual elements into a form that refuses the false coherence of conventional narrative; Postcolonial poets have used assemblage as a philosophical framework for thinking about the hybrid cultural identities produced by colonial contact — identities that are not organically whole but assembled from multiple, sometimes violently combined, traditions; Juxtaposition in modernist poetry (Eliot, Pound, H.D.) operates on the principle of assemblage — meaning emerges from the unexpected proximity of disparate elements rather than from logical connection
Additional Notes
Assemblage theory derives primarily from Deleuze and Guattari's "A Thousand Plateaus," though it has roots in Deleuze's earlier work on Leibniz and Hume. An assemblage (agencement in French — more precisely translated as "arrangement" or "fitting together") is a multiplicity of heterogeneous elements that enter into relations of exteriority — meaning the elements are not defined by their place in the whole but retain their own properties while creating new capacities through connection. Manuel DeLanda has developed assemblage theory as a social ontology. For poets, assemblage offers an alternative to organic unity as the governing ideal — the poem as a provisional gathering of incommensurable elements, where the gaps and tensions between elements are as significant as the connections. Related terms: multiplicity, heterogeneity, Deleuze and Guattari, rhizome, collage, juxtaposition.
Other Meanings of “Assemblage”
Also Known As
heterogeneous collective machinic arrangement emergent multiplicity Blending
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