Not-Dead, At-Least-For-Now Poets

Richard

Founding member

93 poems set to music

Richard is a retired UK police officer, former RAF medic, and English teacher who now works from his home in Spain, tending what he calls a digital “garden” of poetry. As a founding member of V2Melody’s living-poet community, he brings to the salon not only his own verse but an unusually practical and sustained commitment to the ways poems may be heard anew.

That commitment took a decisive form in the summer of 2024, when Richard encountered AI music tools. He discovered the technology in June, conceived the idea for V2Melody in early July, and registered the site later that month. What began as a personal experiment quickly became an extensive, self-funded undertaking: an online archive of musical interpretations, poems, biographical material, and commentary, built by Richard and made freely available without advertising, sign-up requirements, or data collection.

The work is grounded in a plain but generous conviction: poetry can find fresh listeners when it is presented differently. Richard uses AI as a supporting instrument in creating musical adaptations, but the stated aim is not technological display. It is fidelity—to the emotional movement, rhythm, and particular life of the poem. The resulting range is broad, moving among traditional forms, ballads, comic pieces, love songs, historical imaginings, contemporary concerns, and more experimental encounters with technology itself.

His own titles suggest a writer alert to both grand narratives and the oddities of ordinary life. There are poems reaching toward legend and literature—“Boudicca: Warrior Queen,” “Beowulf’s Saga,” “The Ballad of Don Quixote,” and a sequence drawn from Chaucer’s tales—alongside such titles as “Pauline’s Air Fryer Blues,” “Lottery Addict,” “The Song of the Phone,” and “What the Hell, I’m Me.” Elsewhere, “AI Washing,” “I Am the Algorithm’s Melody,” and “The AI Twist” indicate an interest in the new machinery through which this work is also being made.

Richard’s poems and adaptations make room for romance, satire, historical memory, popular song, frustration, wonder, and affectionate irreverence. Several works return in multiple versions, allowing a poem to take on different musical lives rather than settling into a single definitive arrangement. This willingness to revisit material is central to the larger project: a poem is not treated as a fixed artefact placed behind glass, but as language capable of renewed voice and renewed attention.

V2Melody has grown through daily practice and through interests in literature and technology that Richard traces back to the early days of home computing. The scale of the site reflects persistence as much as ambition. Its garden image is apt: it suggests work done incrementally, by hand, with care for what may take root. Richard’s contribution to the salon is therefore both a body of poems and an invitation to listen—to language, to cadence, and to the unexpected forms through which poetry may continue to meet its readers.