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

Polish

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

To refine a poem’s language, rhythm, and transitions through attentive revision. Polishing improves clarity and finish without replacing the poem’s underlying character.

Detailed Definition
Polishing is the late-stage work of making a poem’s existing design clean, responsive, and sonically exact. The poet listens for awkward stresses, unnecessary echoes, weak verbs, accidental vagueness, and transitions that snag the reading. Unlike rebuilding, polishing does not necessarily alter the architecture; it brings the surfaces into alignment with the poem’s intention. Too much polish can erase productive roughness, so the finest revision preserves grain, surprise, and human irregularity.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poet polishes a draft by replacing a vague verb such as “went” with a precise verb such as “limped,” “drifted,” or “charged”; Polishing sound can involve adjusting consonants and vowels until a line carries the desired music; A polished image is vivid without being crowded, as “rain ticking on the tin roof” gives concrete detail with economy; Revision should polish the poem’s surface while preserving its necessary roughness and emotional risk.
Additional Notes
Polishing is the final or near-final attention given to diction, punctuation, rhythm, line breaks, and transitions. It can remove awkwardness and sharpen an image, but it should not erase productive strangeness or the poem’s individual voice. Read both silently and aloud, checking whether each revision improves the whole rather than a single line.
Also Known As
Refine Burnish abrade finish Hone
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