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 P

Parenthetical

Technique
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

Pertaining to insertions that provide supplementary details or shifts in focus within the poetic line.

Detailed Definition
Parenthetical elements function as asides, marked by punctuation to pause the primary narrative; they appear in modernist poetry to fragment thought, reveal subconscious layers, or create dramatic tension, enhancing psychological depth and structural playfulness.
Example
Example in poetry:
Parenthetical asides in John Ashbery's poetry suggest multiple voices or levels of attention; A poet might include parenthetical qualification that ironically undermines the main statement; Parenthetical elements can represent doubt, afterthought, or conversational spontaneity; Frank O'Hara's casual parentheticals create sense of intimate friendship with reader; Parenthetical interruptions mimic how actual thinking and speaking include hesitations and additions; The visual marker of parentheses signals shift in register, tone, or perspective
Additional Notes
Parenthetical describes the quality or function of insertions that provide supplementary details, shifts in focus, qualifications, or tangential information within the main poetic line or statement. While related to parenthesis as a device, "parenthetical" describes a mode of thinking and writing where the primary discourse continually opens to accommodate additional voices, hesitations, or complications. Poets using parenthetical techniques create texts where the margins become as important as the center, and interruption becomes constitutive rather than disruptive. This mode reflects consciousness's non-linear nature—how thoughts include simultaneous qualifications, memories, and associations. Parenthetical writing can create intimacy (sharing asides with readers), anxiety (constant self-correction), or richness (multiple perspectives coexisting). Students should distinguish between parenthetical material that deepens versus that which distracts. The technique relates to digression but operates at the sentence or line level rather than structural level. Understanding parenthetical writing helps readers appreciate how modern poetry often privileges process over product, showing thinking in motion rather than thought completed and polished.
Also Known As
Parenthetical Aside Parenthetical Statement
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