Writing Prompt: Ballad

standard ballad meter

Write a quatrain (a four-line stanza) that alternates four-stress lines and three-stress lines (iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter), or write a few of them. Or you could think of it this way: write a poem you can sing to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

something ballad-ish

Make yourself a little box or a few little boxes. Determine where the end words might fall, and piece together the rest of the quatrain from there. Let yourself vary these as necessary, and keep it going as long as you can. For example, let’s say your end words/phrases are “green grass” and “end of time.” Your boxes might look like this, to start:

__________________________________
_________________________green grass
__________________________________
_________________________end of time

__________________________________
_________________________green grass
__________________________________
_________________________end of time

__________________________________
_________________________green grass
__________________________________
_________________________end of time

__________________________________
_______________________withered grass
__________________________________
_________________________end of time
 

to the tune of

Write a poem that borrows a form—a rhythmic structure—from a song you love, in any tradition or genre. The blues poem is another version of this exercise, with its three-line stanzas of repeating rhyme in the first two lines, but you can do it for any song. Map out the number of beats in each line, the number of lines in each verse or chorus, the arrangement of verses, etc., and take it from there. This is not an exact science. The fun parts will be where you have to improvise with the form a little, letting language do its own thing.