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 O

Offcut

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

An offcut is a removed piece of language that remains valuable after being cut from a poem.

Detailed Definition
An offcut may be a deleted line, image, title, stanza, or alternate ending stored for later use. Cutting does not necessarily prove that the material was weak; it may simply belong to another poem or have arrived before its proper context. Keeping offcuts can protect revision from anxiety about loss, while reviewing them later may reveal recurring obsessions. The poet should resist forcing them back into the original draft, since their usefulness often depends on the freedom created by removal.
Example
Example in poetry:
An offcut is a discarded fragment that can become a poem’s useful final image, as when a rejected line supplies the closing metaphor; A poet may place an offcut from an earlier draft in the margin as a brief epigraph; A collage poem can deliberately assemble offcuts of overheard speech, notes, and abandoned descriptions; The phrase “small scraps of weather” could be an offcut preserved from a longer poem and later given a new context
Additional Notes
An offcut is language removed during revision but preserved because it may serve a later poem, title, epigraph, or alternate version. Saving offcuts helps poets revise boldly without treating every deletion as waste. An offcut can also reveal a competing image, voice, or argument that clarifies what the finished poem chooses to exclude. Related practices include drafting, excision, compression, and archival revision.
Also Known As
Scrap Remnant
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