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

Materiality

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

Materiality emphasizes the physical, sensory presence of things—bodies, texts, sounds—against idealist abstraction. It grounds meaning in substance.

Detailed Definition
Poetry foregrounds materiality through texture, sound, and typography. Philosophically, it asserts that language is not transparent but embodied—ink, breath, vibration—making the poem a physical artifact where meaning arises from tactile, audible presence as much as semantic content.
Example
Example in poetry:
William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just To Say” emphasizes plums’ sensory presence; Emily Dickinson’s handwritten variants show ink as material choice; W.S. Merwin’s unpunctuated lines foreground breath and voice; Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson uses page layout as meaning; C.D. Wright’s prison poems cite inmates’ bodily scars as textual materiality; Robert Creeley’s short lines make breath and silence palpable.
Additional Notes
Materiality emphasizes physical presence of text/body/sound. In poetry, it appears as typography (Howe), breath (Creeley), or sensory detail (Williams). Students should read for how meaning emerges from substance, not just signification. Related to phenomenology, book history, and sound studies. Professors can link it to post-digital poetics and print culture.
Also Known As
Corporeality Material condition Embodiment Matter
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