Stanzaz Poetry Game. Photo courtesy Kristan Taylor.
Kristan Taylor has always loved poetry, and as a teacher, has spent a lot of time thinking of ways to make poetry come alive for students.
During the pandemic, Stanzaz was created on Taylor’s back porch in Oak Cliff, a creative card game that turns players into poets. The player begins with a line from a public domain poem and adds original Stanzaz lines from the deck of cards to continue the poem. Players determine the tone and take turns as editors. The editor decides when the poem ends, and the player who gets the most lines past the editor wins.
“I really just had the goal of making poetry fun and more collaborative, where its something that you could grab your friends and make a poem together,” Taylor said. “That’s where it started, and I had a lot of different versions, but we took advantage of the pandemic to really do more editing and test play.”
With the help of her friends and family, Taylor was able to polish the game and bring it to life.
“So the important thing was that no matter which phrase you’re combining, they all work grammatically,” Taylor said. “So the syntax had to be just right with those phrases. And the context not so much because we wanted to make sure that sometimes it could be a funny poem or absurd poem or a serious poem.”
The game is now on the shelves at several stores, including Whose Books, Austin Public Library, Patchouli Joe’s in Denton, Interabang Books, Talking Animals Books, House Rules Dallas, and more. The game is also available to order online through their website and on Amazon.
“There are fewer and fewer bookstores and independently owned bookstores, and to be in some of the best ones locally, it’s just an honor,” Taylor said. “I hope that people realize that even if they think they don’t like poetry, they should give Stanzaz a try, because we’ve seen so many people who come to our test play or they’ve come to our game nights because their friend brought them and they say they don’t really like poetry. And we watch their face kind of change, as they’re actually playing it and it’s amazing.”
