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 D

Deconstructive Poetics

Technique
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 that undermines binary oppositions, stable meanings, and authorial intent through ambiguity and play.

Detailed Definition
Deconstructive poetics, influenced by Derrida, exposes textual instabilities via puns and contradictions; it appears in language poetry to liberate interpretation, critique power structures, and revel in linguistic flux, pivotal in experimental forms challenging canonical certainties.
Example
Example in poetry:
Language Poetry practitioners like Charles Bernstein deconstruct syntax to expose ideology embedded in conventional grammar; Lyn Hejinian's "My Life" deconstructs autobiography by fragmenting narrative and questioning memory's reliability; Deconstructive poetics questions the assumption that language transparently conveys meaning; Jacques Derrida's concept of différance influences poets who emphasize language's instability; Susan Howe deconstructs historical texts by disrupting their visual and semantic order on the page; Deconstructive poets create works that resist closure and encourage multiple, contradictory readings
Additional Notes
Deconstructive poetics emerged from post-structuralist philosophy, particularly Jacques Derrida's work, deliberately destabilizing meaning, undermining binary oppositions, and revealing how language subverts its own attempts at stable signification. This technique challenges assumptions about authorial control, unified meaning, and the poem as contained artifact. Practitioners like John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, and Language poets employ fragmentation, contradiction, and self-reflexive playfulness to demonstrate how meaning is always deferred, never fully present. Deconstructive poems often juxtapose incompatible registers, interrupt themselves, include white space that questions presence and absence, or deploy puns and wordplay to multiply meanings uncontrollably. The technique isn't simply creating confusion but revealing how all texts contain traces of what they exclude or oppose. When teaching deconstructive poetics, help students recognize specific strategies: highlighting the materiality of language, exposing contradictions within seemingly unified texts, and resisting interpretive closure. This approach questions traditional workshop values like clarity and coherence, instead valuing productive uncertainty and the reader's active participation in meaning-making.
Also Known As
Deconstructive Poetry Deconstruction Experimental language movement Post-structuralist Poetics
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