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

Shaving

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

Shaving is the removal of very small amounts of language to improve precision, pace, or pressure.

Detailed Definition
Shaving differs from a major cut because it works at the scale of articles, modifiers, connective phrases, punctuation, and repeated sounds. A few shaved words can make a line breathe more naturally or allow an image to stand without explanation. The process is delicate: removing every irregularity may flatten voice and rhythm. Poets often shave while reading aloud, listening for places where the mouth labors unnecessarily or where a line carries more verbal weight than its thought requires.
Example
Example in poetry:
Shaving removes excess words without changing the poem’s basic structure, as in cutting “very cold and completely silent” to “cold and silent”; A poet may shave repeated modifiers from every line to make the rhythm more tensile; In revision, shaving a final explanatory sentence can allow the image to remain ambiguous; A poet can shave a sonnet’s diction until its fourteen lines carry only necessary stresses
Additional Notes
Shaving describes micro-revision: removing a word, syllable, qualifier, repetition, or punctuation mark to make a line more exact. Unlike cutting a whole image or stanza, shaving changes the poem by degrees, often improving pace and emphasis. Read the line aloud before and after each change, since a tiny deletion may alter breath, stress, ambiguity, or emotional pressure. It is closely related to pruning and compression.
Also Known As
Paring Clip shive
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