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

Phantom poem

Concept
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

A composition that exists as absence or implication rather than explicit text

Detailed Definition
A composition that exists through implication, absence, or spectral suggestion rather than as explicit text, challenging conventional notions of what constitutes a poem. Phantom poems can be entirely absent works referenced but never written, deleted compositions leaving only traces, or conceptual pieces existing as ideas rather than texts, raising questions about presence, absence, and the boundaries between the real and imagined in literature.
Example
Example in poetry:
Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Circular Ruins” inspires phantom poems—texts that exist only in reference; Harryette Mullen’s “Sleeping with the Dictionary” includes phantom poems through erasure and allusion; Anne Carson’s “Nox” constructs a phantom poem around her brother’s lost letters; Susan Howe’s “Debths” uses archival fragments to imply phantom poems beneath visible text; Contemporary poet Solmaz Sharif’s “Look” references redacted military documents as phantom poems; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s “Dictee” weaves ghostly, multilingual phantom poems from historical silence.
Additional Notes
Entire composition existing through absence or implication. Challenges boundaries of what constitutes a poem. Related to conceptual art practices. Experimental form.
Also Known As
Ghost poem Absent text Implied composition Invisible verse Eidolon poem
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