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

Shadow writing

Device
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 technique wherein meaning is conveyed through omission, suggestion, or subtext—text as a screen for what cannot or will not be said.

Detailed Definition
Text that creates meaning through absence, implication, or what remains unwritten rather than through explicit statement, related to erasure poetry but broader in concept. Shadow writing can involve strategic omissions, gaps in narrative, or negative spaces that become as meaningful as present text, challenging conventional emphasis on presence and plenitude in writing, often used to represent experiences of loss, censorship, marginalization, or ineffability.
Example
Example in poetry:
Walter Benjamin’s concept of “shadow writing” appears in Susan Howe’s archival poems that haunt historical silence; M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Zong!” uses legal text of a slave ship massacre as shadow writing; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s “Dictee” shadows colonial and gendered erasure through fragmented multilingualism; Fred Moten’s “The Feel Trio” engages in shadow writing through Black sonic resistance; Layli Long Soldier’s “Whereas” shadows U.S. government apology language to expose its emptiness; Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen” shadows everyday racism through second-person narration that lingers like a ghost.
Additional Notes
Text that creates meaning through absence or implication. Related to erasure poetry but broader concept. Challenges conventional notions of presence in writing.
Also Known As
Absence writing Ghost text Implied composition Negative inscription Eidolon poem
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