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



Constructivism

Philosophy
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

Constructivism holds that knowledge and meaning are constructed rather than discovered. It emphasises the role of perception and context.

Detailed Definition
Philosophically, constructivism challenges objective notions of truth, suggesting that understanding is shaped by experience, language, and culture. In poetry, it appears in self-reflexive forms that highlight how meaning is made. Poets may foreground the act of writing itself, revealing how interpretation is constructed rather than fixed.
Example
Example in poetry:
Constructivist aesthetics (Russian Constructivism, Bauhaus) influenced the poetics of Mayakovsky and the Objectivists, treating the poem as a constructed object — something made according to principles of function and design rather than expressed from inner feeling; Nelson Goodman's philosophical constructivism — the idea that we make worlds through the symbolic systems we use — has influenced Language poetry's attention to how poetic language constructs (rather than reflects) the worlds it describes; A poet engaged in persona writing might reflect philosophically on the constructivist view of identity — the self is not discovered but constructed through narrative, memory, and social interaction — making the poem both a vehicle and an illustration of this claim; The New Formalism's attention to prosodic construction — the way meter, line breaks, and sound patterns build the poem's architecture — can be read as a constructivist philosophy applied to lyric form; Constructivism in mathematics (the view that mathematical objects are constructed by human minds rather than discovered in a Platonic realm) has philosophical resonance for poets who treat the imagination's constructions as genuinely world-making rather than merely decorative; Muriel Rukeyser's documentary poems construct historical understanding from archival and testimonial materials, enacting a constructivist philosophy of knowledge — truth is not given but built from the available evidence
Additional Notes
Constructivism appears in several distinct philosophical domains. In epistemology, constructivism (Kant, Piaget, Nelson Goodman) holds that knowledge is not discovered but constructed through cognitive and cultural processes. In mathematics, constructivism (Brouwer's intuitionism) holds that mathematical objects exist only insofar as they can be constructed by a finite procedure. In social theory, social constructivism (Berger and Luckmann) holds that social reality is constructed through intersubjective practices and shared meanings. In ethics, constructivism (Rawls, Scanlon) holds that moral principles are constructed by rational agents rather than discovered in a mind-independent moral reality. For poets, constructivism has far-reaching implications: the poem does not reflect a pre-given world but constructs one; identity is not found but made; even the self that speaks in the lyric is a construction. Related terms: social construction, Goodman's world-making, Rawlsian constructivism, intuitionism, anti-realism.
Also Known As
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