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

Dingbat

Printing
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

A decorative typographic symbol or ornament. It can separate sections or add visual emphasis.

Detailed Definition
A dingbat is a small decorative character, symbol, or pictorial mark used in typography apart from ordinary letters and punctuation. Dingbats include flowers, stars, hands, arrows, geometric devices, and printerly ornaments. In poetry books, they may divide sequences, signal a change of speaker, mark a pause between lyrics, or frame a title. Their use can create a distinctive visual atmosphere, though excessive ornament may distract from the poem's language and the meaningful silence of the page.
Example
Example in poetry:
A dingbat is a decorative typographic symbol that can separate sections of a poetry collection; A poet may place a small fleur-de-lis dingbat between groups of haiku instead of using a blank heading; In a chapbook, a star dingbat can signal a shift from one sequence of poems to another; Dingbats should support the poem’s design rather than distract readers from the words
Additional Notes
A "dingbat" (historically known as a printer's ornament, fleurons, or printer's flower) is a decorative character used in typography to separate stanzas, frame pages, or mark structural transitions. In poetry collections, dingbats often serve as visual pauses or breathing marks between un-numbered poem sections or thematic movements. A classic example is the asterism (three stars in a triangle) or the leaf-shaped hedrena. Teaching students to notice dingbats helps them recognize how visual typographic markers guide reading rhythm and section breaks in both historical codices and modern poetry books. Related terms include fleuron, asterism, glyph, and ornamentation.
Also Known As
Printer’s Ornament Typographic Ornament
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