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

Dub influence

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

Dub influence refers to poetic techniques shaped by dub music’s repetition, remix aesthetics, echo effects, political rhythm, and performance energy.

Detailed Definition
Though originating in Caribbean contexts, dub has influenced Black diasporic poetry more broadly, including African American spoken forms. Dub influence may appear through layered repetition, sonic experimentation, performance emphasis, rhythmic fragmentation, and political commentary. The term helps explain poems that privilege sound, remix logic, and oral intensity, linking African American poetry with wider transatlantic Black expressive traditions.
Example
Example in poetry:
A spoken poem using echo, repetition, and remix rhythm reflects dub influence; Verse structured like layered sound engineering demonstrates dub influence; A performance poem with political repetition and sonic fragmentation illustrates this term; Poetry shaped by Black diasporic remix culture can reflect dub influence; A poem privileging sound texture and repetition over linear narration demonstrates dub influence
Additional Notes
Dub poetry, the form most directly associated with dub influence in literature, was developed in Jamaica in the 1970s by poets like Linton Kwesi Johnson and Jean Binta Breeze, fusing the bass-heavy, echo-drenched sound of dub music with political verse in Jamaican patois. The form's influence on African American poetry runs through the Nuyorican poetry movement, spoken word culture, and into contemporary slam and hip hop poetics. Students should listen to recorded dub poetry rather than reading it silently on the page, since the sonic dimension is inseparable from the meaning. Related terms include hip hop poetics, reggae influence, street vernacular, breakbeat poetics, and freestyle poetics. The dub aesthetic of repetition with variation — the same phrase returned to with different emotional inflection — is a powerful teaching tool for understanding oral poetic technique.
Also Known As
Dub poetics Reggae dub influence Caribbean dub aesthetics
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