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



tack

Nautical
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

The lower forward corner of a sail, or the act of sailing into the wind by a zigzag course.

Detailed Definition
As both a sail-corner and a maneuver, tack embodies the cunning required to progress against adversity. In poetry, "to tack" is to change direction not out of indecision but out of strategic wisdom, moving obliquely toward a goal when a direct path is impossible. The tack also refers to the hard, windward edge of the sail, a point of maximum tension and strain. This duality makes it a favorite for poems about resilience, adaptive intelligence, and the serpentine paths of ambition or love that cannot be achieved by frontal assault but must be won through patience and indirection.
Example
Example in poetry:
The tack in poetry embodies the cunning required to progress against adversity.; To “tack” is to change direction not out of indecision but out of strategic wisdom, moving obliquely toward a goal.; The tack also refers to the hard, windward edge of the sail, a point of maximum tension and strain.; Poets use the tack to discuss resilience, adaptive intelligence, and the serpentine paths of ambition.; The tack is the lower forward corner of a sail, or the act of sailing into the wind by a zigzag course.; It represents the art of yielding to make progress.
Additional Notes
A tack is the lower forward corner of a sail, and also the act of sailing into the wind by a zigzag course. In poetry, this duality is key: the tack embodies the cunning required to progress against adversity. To "tack" is to change direction not out of indecision but out of strategic wisdom, moving obliquely toward a goal when a direct path is impossible. The tack is a point of maximum tension and strain, a symbol of resilience, adaptive intelligence, and the serpentine paths of ambition that cannot be achieved by frontal assault but must be won through patience and indirection.
Other Meanings of “tack”
Also Known As
Tackle (confused) course zigzag stitch push-pin
Skip to main content