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 G

grounding verse

Structure
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 stanza or line used to stabilize or anchor a poem's rhythm or theme.

Detailed Definition
Grounding verse denotes a stanza or line that re-centers a poem’s thematic or emotional trajectory, typically by reaffirming core values, returning to concrete imagery, or restoring syntactic order after fragmentation; it acts as a stabilizing force in experimental or emotionally volatile poetry, helping the reader reconnect with the poem’s central concerns—such as a return to domestic imagery in a war poem to emphasize loss or resilience.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things,” grounding verse connects body and earth; In Gary Snyder’s “Riprap,” grounding verse maps stones and words; In Lucille Clifton’s “homage to my hips,” grounding verse celebrates bodily autonomy; In Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” grounding verse links tobacco fields to immigrant labor; In Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen,” grounding verse documents Black bodies in American landscape; In Layli Long Soldier’s “38,” grounding verse recounts Dakota land loss.
Additional Notes
grounding verse: A line or stanza of poetry that is notably concrete, literal, or factual, anchoring the poem's emotional or imaginative flight to a tangible reality; it prevents the poem from becoming too abstract.
Also Known As
anchoring verse stabilizing stanza grounding song base poetry Ballast line
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