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 R

Reification

Philosophy
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

Reification is the process of treating abstract concepts, social relations, or human qualities as if they were concrete, material things. It is a form of objectification.

Detailed Definition
Marxist theory uses reification to critique commodity fetishism. In poetry, it appears as a critique of dehumanization, where people are reduced to objects in a capitalist system. Poets may use imagery of things to represent human emptiness or alienation. This concept helps reveal the social processes that make the abstract seem natural, allowing poetry to expose the hidden injuries of class and labor.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about the modern city that describes its people as "specters" or "shadows" is engaging in reification, turning human relations into ghostly things; The representation of a worker solely by their labor or their machine, as in some proletarian poetry, is a reification; A poem that critiques consumerism, like a poem about shopping malls, might use reification to show how objects come to dominate life; The feeling of being turned into an object by another person is a theme of reification in love poetry.
Additional Notes
Reification is the act of treating an abstract concept, a social relation, or a human quality as if it were a concrete, material thing. It is a form of objectification, central to Marxist theory, where it is used to describe how capitalist society transforms human labor and social relationships into things (commodities). Reification hides the social origins of phenomena, making them appear natural and inevitable. In poetry, reification appears as a critique of dehumanization, where people are reduced to objects, or where abstract concepts like "justice" or "freedom" are presented as tangible entities. Poets may use imagery of things to represent human emptiness or alienation. This term helps poetry expose the hidden processes of power and ideology.
Also Known As
Objectification (related) Thingification Commodification materialization
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