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.

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 Poetry Movement

Historical And Literary Periods
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 Caribbean poetic tradition, particularly Jamaican, combining reggae rhythms with spoken word poetry. Emerged in the 1970s as a decolonial art form celebrating Black consciousness and critiquing oppression through orality and rhythm.

Detailed Definition
The Dub Poetry Movement revolutionized Caribbean poetry through explicit engagement with reggae music and oral tradition. Poets like Linton Kwesi Johnson merged linguistic innovation with political consciousness. This movement appears in poetry through reggae rhythms and musical accompaniment, Jamaican Creole and code-switching, performance-oriented poetry, political critique, celebration of Black identity and culture, explicit engagement with orality, and the use of dub techniques from music production, establishing dub poetry as a powerful decolonial and politically engaged poetic practice.
Example
Example in poetry:
A performance poem by a Dub Poetry Movement artist like Linton Kwesi Johnson, structured around a heavy reggae or nyabinghi drum rhythm, meant to be spoken to music; A work using Jamaican patois and direct, politically charged language to address social inequality, police brutality, and post-colonial reality; The use of strong internal rhyme, alliteration, and repetition, drawing from the oral traditions of toasting and sound system culture; A poem that focuses on the lived experience of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain.
Additional Notes
The Dub Poetry Movement, rooted in 1970s Jamaica, combines spoken word, reggae rhythm, and political consciousness. Poets like Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mutabaruka fuse performance and protest, using dialect and repetition to affirm Black identity and social justice.
Also Known As
Dub Poetry Dub Verse
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