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 S

self-commentary stanza

Form
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 stanza in which the poet reflects on the poem’s own construction, purpose, or reception, creating meta-poetic commentary.

Detailed Definition
A self-commentary stanza is a poetic unit in which the speaker directly reflects on the act of writing the poem itself, offering meta-poetic observations about form, intention, difficulty, or reception within the stanza’s lines; this technique blurs the boundary between creation and critique, inviting readers into the poet’s compositional process and often revealing anxieties about language, legacy, or authenticity, as seen in the ars poetica stanzas of Horace, the self-doubting asides in Elizabeth Bishop’s drafts, or the recursive stanzas of Paul Muldoon that interrogate their own rhetorical strategies.
Example
Example in poetry:
In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the line “(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)” is a self-commentary stanza mocking social anxiety; In “Citizen,” Rankine inserts “You begin to think, maybe…” as self-commentary stanza; Contemporary poet uses parentheses to undercut main narrative: “(But I lied)”; Student exercise: stanza ending with “—or so I tell myself”; Another: “(This is not a poem about my father).”
Additional Notes
Self-commentary stanza includes meta-poetic reflection on its own construction or purpose. Related to testimonial aspect. Common in modern and postmodern poetry—note how it blurs creator/creation or invites reader complicity.
Also Known As
Meta stanza Reflexive verse Self-referential unit Exegetic Stanza
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