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 H

Hyperreality

Philosophy
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

Hyperreality is Baudrillard’s condition where simulations replace reality, making the distinction between real and representation collapse.

Detailed Definition
Poetry responds to hyperreality through pastiche, media saturation, or self-referentiality. It interrogates authenticity in a world of copies, often using irony or fragmentation to expose how language and image construct experience—questioning whether genuine presence remains possible in simulated culture.
Example
Example in poetry:
Don DeLillo’s poetic prose in White Noise (influencing verse) depicts media saturation as hyperreal; Jorie Graham’s Fast layers digital, mythic, and bodily registers into simulated reality; Claudia Rankine’s Citizen uses real incidents filtered through second-person to blur lived and mediated racism; Baudrillardian themes in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red collapse myth and contemporary gay experience; W.H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen” satirizes statistical identity as hyperreal personhood; Ocean Vuong’s Time Is a Mother blends memory, film, and trauma into unstable reality.
Additional Notes
Hyperreality (Baudrillard) is simulation replacing reality. In poetry, it appears as media-saturated imagery: Rankine’s Citizen, Graham’s digital fragments. Students should analyze how poems navigate authenticity in simulated culture. Related to simulacra, kitsch, and postmodernism. Professors can link it to digital poetics and identity performance.
Also Known As
Simulation Simulacrum dominance Simulacrum
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