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

Magical Realism

Art
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

An artistic mode that presents extraordinary events within an otherwise realistic world.

Detailed Definition
Magical realism treats the marvelous as ordinary, allowing ghosts, transformations, impossible objects, or mythic presences to coexist with daily life without elaborate explanation. In poetry, it can enlarge realism without abandoning social or historical specificity. A magical realist poem may describe a household, street, or landscape with plain accuracy while admitting wonder as part of its lived reality, especially where memory and inherited belief are strong.
Example
Example in poetry:
A magical realism poem can describe an impossible event in a calm, matter-of-fact voice, such as a house quietly growing roots overnight; Gabriel García Márquez’s fiction offers a model for presenting marvels as part of ordinary communal life; A poet may write that a dead grandmother continues to iron clothes, while the family discusses weather and rent; Magical realism works best when concrete sensory details make the strange event feel emotionally believable rather than merely fantastical
Additional Notes
Magical realism presents extraordinary, impossible, or supernatural events within a recognisably ordinary world, often without the explanatory framework expected in fantasy. Characters may accept such events as part of reality, allowing the mode to challenge conventional distinctions between history, myth, memory, and the marvellous. Although strongly associated with twentieth-century Latin American literature, the term has wider and sometimes contested usage. In poetry, look for matter-of-fact treatment of impossibility. Compare surrealism, fantasy, myth, fabulism, dream logic, the marvellous, realism, folklore, defamiliarisation, and symbolic narrative.
Other Meanings of “Magical Realism”
Also Known As
Magic Realism
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