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

chisel

Craft Terms
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

Chisel is a sharp tool used for cutting or carving hard material; in poetry, it can suggest precision, shaping, and the removal of excess to reveal form.

Detailed Definition
Literally, a chisel is used by a craftsperson to carve stone or wood. In poetry, it may stand for the careful work of refining language, cutting away what is unnecessary, or giving hard-edged shape to thought. Its craft value lies in the idea of deliberate, exact making.
Example
Example in poetry:
A sculptor-poet metaphor might describe the act of writing as chiseling meaning from raw language; Michelangelo's poems themselves use chiseling as a metaphor for artistic revelation from stone; A poet describing careful revision might say they chisel a poem down to its essential lines; Chiseled imagery often appears in poems about monuments and inscriptions; A poet may describe a grandfather's face as chiseled by decades of labor and weather; In ekphrastic poetry about sculpture, chisel marks become a metaphor for the artist's visible labor.
Additional Notes
Chisel evokes precision, deliberate effort, and the visible marks of labor, making it a common metaphor for the poet's careful shaping of language, particularly in discussions of revision and formal control; the term is closely associated with sculpture, and instructors often draw comparisons between the sculptor removing excess material to reveal form and the poet cutting excess words to reveal meaning, a comparison famously associated with Michelangelo's own writings on art; chisel work implies both violence and delicacy simultaneously, since the tool must be forceful enough to cut stone yet controlled enough to create fine detail.
Other Meanings of “chisel”
Also Known As
carve gouge pare shape with chisel
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