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

Dispossession

Black American
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

Dispossession refers to loss of land, rights, security, autonomy, inheritance, or belonging through systemic oppression or historical violence.

Detailed Definition
African American poetry addresses dispossession through themes of enslavement, labour exploitation, family separation, exclusion from wealth, cultural erasure, and denied citizenship. The concept extends beyond material property to emotional and symbolic forms of loss, including stolen identity or interrupted continuity. It helps interpret poetry where deprivation is historical and structural rather than merely personal misfortune.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about stolen land, labour, and inheritance reflects dispossession; Verse describing exclusion from wealth accumulation demonstrates dispossession; Natasha Trethewey’s historical themes often intersect with dispossession; A poem linking family poverty to structural theft illustrates dispossession; Poetry about cultural erasure and denied belonging reflects dispossession
Additional Notes
Dispossession in African American poetry encompasses not only the theft of land (through post-Reconstruction terror, redlining, urban renewal, and eminent domain) but the broader removal of rights, safety, identity, and belonging. The destruction of Black Wall Street is a paradigmatic instance, but poets also address the more chronic, diffuse dispossessions of poverty, incarceration, and cultural erasure. Students should trace how dispossession poems negotiate between documentary specificity and symbolic resonance. Related terms include Black Wall Street, plantation memory, enslavement memory, carceral imagination, and return migration. Ta-Nehisi Coates's essay "The Case for Reparations" provides useful historical context alongside primary poetic texts.
Also Known As
Dispossession narratives Land loss Property theft themes
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