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 K

Korean Gasa Tradition

Tradition
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 Korean narrative and reflective tradition using extended rhythmic lines to treat travel, instruction, devotion, nature, and social experience.

Detailed Definition
Gasa poetry emerged during the Joseon period and was written in forms that could accommodate sustained exposition as well as lyrical feeling. Poets described journeys, moral principles, religious devotion, domestic concerns, political ideals, and encounters with landscapes in flowing sequences of paired rhythmic units. The genre appeared in both elite literary settings and works by women and other writers whose experiences broadened Korean poetic subject matter. Its length and flexibility allow personal voice, practical observation, and philosophical reflection to coexist.
Example
Example in poetry:
A Korean Gasa poem may unfold as a long first-person meditation on exile, travel, or moral instruction; a woman’s travel gasa can record domestic duties and the emotional geography of separation; the form often combines regular rhythmic lines with expandable narration, allowing a poet to move from landscape description to reflection; in a new gasa, a poet could describe a train journey through Seoul while preserving the form’s reflective, sequential movement
Additional Notes
Korean Gasa is an extended Korean verse form traditionally written in long rhythmic lines, often blending lyric reflection with narrative movement. Gasa could describe journeys, landscapes, religious devotion, moral instruction, women’s experience, or responses to political and social life. Unlike a short fixed lyric, it allows sustained development and shifts in tone. Students may compare its travel writing and didactic purpose with pilgrimage poetry, memoir, or meditative verse; performance, rhythm, and the relation between oral and written culture are also important.
Also Known As
Kasa Korean Kasa
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