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 E

Epergesis

Constraint
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 poem that includes explanatory or parenthetical commentary within its lines.

Detailed Definition
Epergesis integrates clarifying asides—often in parentheses or dashes—directly into poetic lines, blending narrative with meta-commentary; this constraint disrupts lyrical flow to insert analysis, doubt, or digression, reflecting modernist self-consciousness and creating layered discourse where primary text and gloss coexist, challenging the purity of poetic utterance through embedded interpretation.
Example
Example in poetry:
Epergesis (explanatory insertion): parenthetical clarifications in John Donne’s sermons adapted to verse; Walt Whitman’s catalogues with explanatory asides; modern footnotes as epergetic constraint; e.e. cummings’ embedded explanations (“(listen)”)”; constraint poets use brackets to define nonce words; epergesis in dramatic monologues explaining motives.
Additional Notes
Epergesis inserts explanatory phrases (e.g., parentheses, dashes). Used by Whitman and cummings for intimacy or clarification. As constraint, students might mandate one epergetic aside per stanza. It adds conversational texture and layers meaning.
Also Known As
Parenthetical explanation apposition
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