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 M

Macaronic stanza

Form
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 that alternates lines or phrases in different languages, creating a multilingual texture within a single verse unit.

Detailed Definition
A Macaronic stanza is a verse paragraph that alternates or blends languages line by line or within lines, creating polyglot texture and cultural dialogue; it challenges monolingual norms and can express diasporic identity, scholarly erudition, or playful code-switching, as in Renaissance humanist verse or modern Chicano poetry.
Example
Example in poetry:
Dante’s “Divine Comedy” uses macaronic stanza blending Italian and Latin; Ezra Pound’s “Cantos” mix English, Chinese, and Greek in macaronic stanzas; Contemporary poet A.E. Stallings rhymes English with Greek in macaronic stanzas; Vladimir Nabokov’s English poems include Russian echoes in macaronic stanzas; Nathalie Handal’s “The Republics” blends Arabic, French, and English in macaronic stanzas; Yoko Tawada writes German-Japanese macaronic stanzas exploring exile.
Additional Notes
Stanza form mixing languages within its structure. Related: macaronic verse, multilingual poetry. Tip: Examine whether language alternation follows metrical or thematic patterns, revealing deeper structural principles.
Also Known As
Mixed-language stanza Bilingual form Multilingual verse unit Code-switching stanza
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