Telepoem

Telepoem is a poetry game by Christina Tran and Albert Kong. We designed it for the Poetry Open House event in January 2020, hosted by the Poet Laureate of the City of Olympia, Sadie Sparks.

You can download a print and play here for free, or order a physical copy of the zine by emailing us at mountcaz@gmail.com and contributing any amount you like (suggested $5-$15). We’ll sign it for you! It makes a mediocre-amazing gift, sliding scale.

Players take turns writing new drafts of a text, guided by a number of poetic prompts, creating poems that dip in and out of brilliance and word salad.

Like the game of Telephone, content and meaning get garbled over the course of many exchanges; unlike Telephone, the garbling is deliberate, prompted, and occasionally results in some really profound shit. When you go back and look through the stack of poems that were made, you see a journey that no one intended and no one could have planned.

We think, like our own lives and experiences, we can only control it now and again, but when we surrender to our friends to shape things, they can lead us to deep beauty. And sometimes complete bafflement.