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

City poetry

Genre
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

Poetry that engages with urban environments, experiences, and imagery

Detailed Definition
City poetry is a genre that engages deeply with urban environments, capturing the rhythms, architecture, social dynamics, and sensory overload of metropolitan life; from Baudelaire’s “Paris Spleen” to Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen,” it often employs fragmentation, polyvocality, and rapid verse to mirror the chaos and density of cityscapes, exploring themes of alienation, diversity, and modernity.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Chicago" by Carl Sandburg ("Hog Butcher for the World..."); "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" evoking London streets; "Manhattan" by Langston Hughes capturing urban rhythm; "Brooklyn August" by Paul Blackburn describing city heat and noise; "Montreal" by Leonard Cohen blending alleyways and longing
Additional Notes
City poetry engages urban landscapes, rhythms, and social dynamics—crowds, architecture, noise, alienation; key examples include Baudelaire’s "Paris Spleen," Sandburg’s "Chicago," and contemporary poets like Claudia Rankine; often uses collage, fragmentation, and polyvocality; students should analyze how form (e.g., rapid verse, asymmetrical lines) mirrors city chaos; overlaps with "geographic verse" but emphasizes human density over natural terrain.
Also Known As
urban verse metropolitan lyric civic stanzas urban observational poetry Urban/Street Poetry
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