Biography

July 2, 1971 · Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Evelyn Yee-Fun Lau

I love the poetry-in-transit model, and I'd love to expand on that and do something to what Santa Cruz is doing. We're also talking about using the big video screens downtown, the bus shelters..where we have a jury and get poets to submit their work.

[on writing and publishing poetry] It's very, very difficult when you give so much of your energy and creativity to a project that doesn't get much feedback. Forget money-making or anything else, you don't even get people who read and respond to the work. I think for a lot of people poetry is something that they don't encounter very often in their regular lives and so it takes on this forbidding, mysterious quality. They're afraid of it, and they don't think it has any bearing on their lives.

Poets essentially end up speaking to other poets, which is something we essentially complain about. But at the same time those are our truest readers: the people who are willing to pay attention to the words and give the sort of attention that poetry demands.