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 C

Calligramme

French
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 poem in which the typographical arrangement of words on the page creates a visual shape related to the poem's subject. Pioneered by Guillaume Apollinaire in his 1918 collection.

Detailed Definition
The calligramme is one of the most radical experiments at the intersection of poetry and visual art, achieving its definitive form with Guillaume Apollinaire's collection Calligrammes published in 1918. By arranging words to form the visual image of their subject, a rain of falling letters, a dove, or the Eiffel Tower, Apollinaire dissolved the boundary between reading and seeing, text and image. He drew inspiration from ancient pattern poetry and Mallarmé's spatial experiments in Un Coup de Dés. The calligramme prefigures concrete poetry and remains a touchstone of avant-garde experimentation with the visual materiality of language.
Example
Example in poetry:
Apollinaire's calligramme "Il pleut" arranges the text in vertical diagonal lines that visually represent falling rain, so that reading the poem requires following the text downward as rain falls, making the physical act of reading enact the poem's content; His calligramme "La Cravate et la montre" arranges words in the shapes of a tie and a watch, creating visual puns on time, constraint, and elegance that enrich the verbal meaning through their visual form; A student creating a calligramme about a tree might arrange the words describing roots at the bottom of the page, trunk words vertically in the center, and branch and leaf words spreading outward at the top, making the page itself a tree; The calligramme tradition draws on ancient Greek technopaignia, pattern poems shaped like wings or altars, showing that the impulse to make poetry visual is as old as poetry itself and not merely a modernist invention; Apollinaire's calligrammes were partly inspired by his experience of World War I, where he observed that communication itself had become fragmented and spatial, making the dissolution of linear reading a reflection of historical upheaval; Teaching calligrammes invites students to think about the relationship between the visual and verbal dimensions of poetry, questioning why we normally read in lines and what is gained or lost when we read in shapes instead.
Additional Notes
Calligramme is inseparable from Guillaume Apollinaire in French literary study, though shaped poetry has earlier precedents. Here typography becomes part of poetic meaning, requiring visual as well as verbal reading. Students should consider how line arrangement alters pacing, emphasis, and interpretation. Compare with poésie concrète, though the two are not identical historically or theoretically. The calligramme is particularly valuable for teaching multimodal poetics, where the material form of language becomes inseparable from semantic content.
Also Known As
Calligram Visual Verse
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