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

systematic limitation

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 written constraint method that restricts choice in order to stimulate creative outcomes

Detailed Definition
Systematic limitation is a compositional strategy in which a poet imposes a rigorous, rule-based constraint—such as a fixed vocabulary, excluded letters, or predetermined line lengths—not as a hindrance but as a method to channel creativity, heighten linguistic awareness, and discover unexpected meanings; rooted in Oulipo and conceptual writing, this approach treats limitation as generative, as seen in Christian Bök’s Eunoia, where each chapter uses only one vowel, demonstrating how restriction can yield innovation.
Example
Example in poetry:
In haiku, the 5-7-5 syllable count imposes systematic limitation that sharpens focus, as in Bashō’s “An old silent pond”; The sonnet’s 14-line constraint in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”) channels satire through form; In “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” Dylan Thomas uses the villanelle’s systematic limitation—two repeating refrains—to intensify emotional urgency; Contemporary poet A.E. Stallings works within the sestina’s systematic limitation of end-word rotation to explore obsession; In concrete poetry, George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” uses typographic limitation to mirror spiritual ascent.
Additional Notes
Systematic limitation imposes strict constraints (e.g., lipograms, fixed forms). Related to productive verse. Paradoxically fosters creativity—try writing under a rule (e.g., no adjectives) to discover fresh solutions.
Also Known As
Rule restriction Structured limit Constraint system Generative constraint
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