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

Civil disobedience

Black American
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

Civil disobedience refers to the deliberate, nonviolent refusal to comply with unjust laws or authority as a form of political protest, a practice central to the Civil Rights Movement and a recurring subject in African American protest poetry.

Detailed Definition
In poetry, civil disobedience is both a historical subject and a formal model: the poem itself may refuse the conventions of respectability, white literary standards, or official narratives. African American poets from Langston Hughes through Amiri Baraka through Sonia Sanchez have made the resistant act of writing a form of civil disobedience. The sit-in, the freedom march, and the boycott are its most famous expressions. Related to protest poetry, resistance poetry, civil rights poetry, collective struggle, and social protest verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
Sonia Sanchez's poetry from the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movement eras enacts civil disobedience formally as well as thematically, refusing standard grammar, capitalisation, and poetic conventions as a textual refusal of white literary authority; A poet engaging civil disobedience as a theme might write from inside the experience of a sit-in, capturing the physical vulnerability and moral clarity of choosing to occupy space in defiance of law and social pressure; Langston Hughes's "Ballad of the Landlord" engages civil disobedience by presenting a Black tenant's refusal to accept unjust housing conditions and showing how the legal system punishes Black assertion of rights; Nikki Giovanni's political poems from the late 1960s engage civil disobedience by explicitly endorsing confrontational resistance, challenging the nonviolent orthodoxy of mainstream civil rights discourse; A student poet might write a dramatic monologue in the voice of a young person deciding for the first time to refuse an unjust order, capturing the specific mix of fear, moral clarity, and community solidarity that civil disobedience requires; The formal properties of erasure poetry can themselves constitute a form of civil disobedience when applied to legal or governmental texts, removing official language's authority by revealing what it suppresses or excludes
Additional Notes
Civil disobedience in Black American poetry celebrates the deliberate nonviolent refusal to comply with unjust laws or authority as a form of protest drawing from Civil Rights legacies to model ethical resistance and moral authority; for students and professors it connects to freedom poetics resistance song and moral witness offering tools to analyze verse that documents sit-ins marches or boycotts while highlighting its roots in Thoreau and King to underscore poetry's role in sustaining collective nonviolent power against state violence.
Also Known As
Nonviolent resistance Protest disobedience Civil rights disobedience
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