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 N

Negative Space

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

The empty area around or between visible forms in an artwork. In poetry, it corresponds to silence, omission, pauses, and the expressive use of white space.

Explore this topic in depth (1)

Free Verse — Free verse is not prose broken into short lines. It is verse that gives up a regular metrical pattern and predetermined rhyme scheme, while using lineation, cadence, syntax, repetition, sound and space to make deliberate form.

Detailed Definition
Negative space is the unoccupied portion of a visual composition, but it is not merely blank background; it helps define shape, balance, emphasis, and movement. In poetry, negative space may appear as line breaks, stanza gaps, ellipses, withheld information, or silence around a statement. A poet can use emptiness to create suspense, grief, hesitation, or openness, allowing what remains unsaid to become an active part of the poem's meaning.
Example
Example in poetry:
In a poem shaped on the page, wide blank areas can create negative space that represents silence, absence, or an unsaid thought; Emily Dickinson's dashes and pauses can be read as creating negative space around words, allowing uncertainty to remain; A grief poem might leave a blank after the dead person's name, making the page enact the speaker's loss; A poet can describe an empty doorway or unoccupied chair as visual negative space that makes surrounding objects more emotionally charged
Additional Notes
In poetry, negative space includes line breaks, stanza gaps, indentation, ellipses, and deliberate silence. These absences can control pacing, isolate an image, or make readers supply what remains unsaid. Compare caesura and enjambment: a caesura interrupts within a line, while visual space shapes the page. Practical hint: read the poem aloud, then ask whether each pause creates tension, emphasis, or room for reflection.
Also Known As
White Space Empty Space Absence Blank space White space poetic Whitespace
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