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

Cooperage

Viniculture
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

Cooperage is the craft of making and repairing wooden barrels used for aging wine.

Detailed Definition
Cooperage evokes craftsmanship, tradition, and the shaping of time in poetry. The barrel maker’s skill mirrors the poet’s craft, both shaping containers for maturation. Poets use this term to honor manual labor, the wisdom of wood, and the slow transformation that occurs within confined spaces, symbolizing protection, influence, and the intimate relationship between vessel and content.
Example
Example in poetry:
Cooperage shaped the wine's breathing, and the poet sang of the oak staves as the vessel's ribs; He wrote of cooperage as the barrel-maker's craft, a fire-bent wood that imparts vanilla and toast; In her ode, the cooperage was the cradle of maturation, each cask a drum for the aging wine's heartbeat; The poet compared cooperage to the stanza's frame—the oak structure that holds the liquid lines; She called the cooperage a wooden cathedral, where wine learned the smoky sermons of slow time
Additional Notes
Cooperage is the ancient craft of constructing barrels, casks, and other wooden containers used for fermenting and aging wine, and the coopers (the artisans) select specific oak species (primarily Quercus robur and Quercus alba) and determine grain, toasting level, and size to influence the wine's final character; the wood imparts flavors like vanilla, toast, coconut, and spice, while also allowing micro-oxygenation that softens tannins and promotes color stability, and the size of the barrel matters greatly—smaller barrels have a higher surface-to-volume ratio, leading to greater oak influence, while larger formats like foudres provide more subtle effects; in poetry, cooperage embodies the marriage of craft and nature, the human shaping of a living material to cradle the wine, a perfect analogy for form and content in artistic creation.
Also Known As
barrel making oak craftsmanship cask art coopers
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