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

Crackleware

Ceramics
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

Crackleware features intentional crackled glazes that create a network of fine lines, valued for their aged, textured appearance.

Detailed Definition
In the category of ceramics, crackleware celebrates imperfection and the beauty of time's passage through its distinctive surface. Poets use it metaphorically for human vulnerability, memory's fractures, and wabi-sabi aesthetics, populating verses with objects that embody resilience and patina. Crackleware enriches domestic poetry by highlighting texture as narrative, supporting themes of aging, repair, and the aesthetic value of wear in household objects.
Example
Example in poetry:
Crackleware — pottery with a deliberately induced network of fine cracks in the glaze — appears in poems about deliberate imperfection and the beauty of controlled damage; Chinese Guan and Ge wares, with their famous crackle glazes, inspired Song dynasty poets who praised the cracks as "ice breaking on a river in spring"; A poem about grief might use crackleware as its central image: "still whole, still useful, only the surface tells what it has been through — a map of where the heat went in"; The deliberate quality of crackle — the potter choosing to crack what they might have kept smooth — suits poems about the conscious embrace of vulnerability; In a ekphrastic poem about a museum collection, a crackleware vase invites a meditation on time: "the cracks came all at once, at the moment of cooling — a whole biography written in an instant"; John Ashbery's interest in surfaces that reveal their own making finds an analogue in crackleware: the glaze that shows, in its fracturing, the stress it survived.
Additional Notes
Crackleware — known in Chinese as guanyao (official ware) in the context of Song and later Chinese ceramics, or as craquelure in French art terminology — achieves its distinctive network of fine cracks through the deliberate mismatch between the glaze and the clay body's rates of contraction during cooling. In Chinese Song-dynasty aesthetics, this quality was not a defect but an achievement, evoking aged ice, dried river mud, or the veining of jade. In Japanese and Korean traditions, similar effects were cultivated in tea wares as embodiments of wabi (rustic imperfection) and the beauty of age. Poets drawn to crackled surfaces often use them to explore themes of controlled entropy, the visible trace of time, and beauty that depends on imperfection.
Also Known As
Crackle glaze ware
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