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

Shattering device

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 deliberate stylistic choice to break apart poetic unity or coherence, often for emphasis or innovation

Detailed Definition
Shattering device is a formal or rhetorical technique in contemporary poetry that deliberately fractures syntax, lineation, or narrative coherence to convey psychological trauma, systemic violence, or epistemological rupture; through abrupt enjambment, typographical disarray, or semantic disjunction, the shattering device enacts the breakdown of stable meaning, as in the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser or contemporary war poets, where form mirrors the fragmentation of memory or society, forcing the reader to piece together shards of experience and confront the limits of representation in the face of catastrophe.
Example
Example in poetry:
In “Daddy,” Plath’s Holocaust imagery is a shattering device confronting patriarchal violence; In “Citizen,” Rankine’s Serena Williams vignette is a shattering device exposing racism; Contemporary poet uses police report language as shattering device in elegy; Student example: inserting legal jargon into love poem as shattering device; Another: using weather forecast to describe emotional collapse.
Additional Notes
Shattering device violently breaks form (e.g., sudden lineation, syntax) to convey trauma or rupture. Related to disruption tool. Use with clear purpose—disorder should illuminate, not obscure, the poem’s emotional core.
Also Known As
Form shatterer Structure breaker Poetic fracture device Fragmentation device
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