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 L

Level

Craft Terms
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

Level is to bring a poem’s competing elements into deliberate proportion without making them identical.

Detailed Definition
Leveling may involve balancing long and short lines, abstract and concrete language, narrative and reflection, or silence and speech. The goal is not uniformity but a surface on which each component can exert its proper force. A poem that spends too long explaining may need more image; one that remains entirely imagistic may need a clear human pressure. Leveling is an editorial act of proportion, helping the reader feel that no accidental imbalance has replaced the poet’s intended design.
Example
Example in poetry:
To level a poem is to make its parts receive comparable attention and force; A poet might level an overdramatic opening by strengthening the quieter middle images; In a sequence, leveling the line lengths can create a steady visual field; A revision may level the diction by replacing one conspicuously ornate phrase with language that matches the surrounding poem
Additional Notes
To level a poem is to adjust its competing elements into intentional proportion. This may mean giving a quiet image enough space, reducing an over-explained conclusion, or balancing narrative information against reflection. Leveling does not flatten differences or make every line equally forceful; it creates a controlled relationship among parts. Compare stanza length, tonal intensity, image density, and syntactic complexity when assessing the poem’s overall equilibrium.
Also Known As
Even Horizontal align Echelon rung spirit level stratum
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