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

constrained writing

Form
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 composed under specific formal or linguistic restrictions

Detailed Definition
Constrained writing is a poetic technique wherein the poet imposes specific formal, linguistic, or structural limitations—such as lipograms, acrostics, or fixed syllable counts—to stimulate creativity and focus expression; examples include Georges Perec’s novel without the letter "e" or sonnets adhering to strict rhyme schemes, demonstrating how restriction can paradoxically enhance imaginative freedom and linguistic precision.
Example
Example in poetry:
Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a novel written without the letter “e,” exemplifies constrained writing; Christian Bök’s Eunoia, where each chapter uses only one vowel, demonstrates extreme constraint; Oulipo poets often use lipograms or palindromes as constrained writing techniques; “Alphabet” by Inger Christensen uses the Fibonacci sequence to constrain line length
Additional Notes
Constrained writing involves composing under formal restrictions (e.g., lipograms, specific rhyme schemes, or syllable counts), challenging poets to innovate within limits; notable examples include Oulipo techniques and works like "Gadsby" (a novel without the letter E).
Also Known As
Restricted Composition Formal Constraint Rule-Bound Verse Lexical Limitation Lipogram Oulipo Letter-restriction verse
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