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 W

Washboard

Musical Instrument
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 ribbed metal board played with thimbles or spoons, used in jug bands and folk music

Detailed Definition
The washboard’s rhythmic scrape appears in African American and folk poetry to symbolize resourcefulness, domestic labor transformed into art, and communal joy; its DIY nature makes it a metaphor for lyrical ingenuity and the music of everyday life in verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
In blues poetry, the washboard’s scrape becomes the rhythm of labor and laundry lines in Delta heat; A Langston Hughes poem likens the washboard’s ridges to “the spine of survival”; Modern poets use the washboard to evoke jug band joy and Depression-era ingenuity; In a feminist verse, the washboard transforms from domestic tool to instrument of rebellion; A contemporary poem compares the washboard’s metallic rasp to cicadas on summer porches; In diasporic poetry, the washboard’s sound links African rhythms to Appalachian kitchens.
Additional Notes
The washboard is a folk percussion instrument using thimbles or spoons on a ribbed metal surface; central to jug bands and zydeco, it transforms domestic labor into rhythm—poets might use it to explore the music of everyday objects, the body’s improvisation with household tools, or the washboard as symbol of resourceful joy in marginalized communities.
Also Known As
Rubboard
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