In her 1977 essay “Poetry is Not A Luxury,” Audre Lorde wrote: “Poetry is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”  Poets Elena Georgiou and Michael Lassell, who co-edited the highly anticipated anthology The World in Us, could not agree more.

“In the nineteenth century, poets were widely read and had major impact,” says Lassell. “In other countries today, poems appear in daily newspapers next to the soccer scores. People are sent to jail or elected president for writing those poems. The notion that poetry is obscure confuses people. Reading poetry is just like reading anything else.”

“Why in this day of music videos are we so afraid of something that takes ten minutes to read?” Georgiou laughs. “Because we’re still fighting high school English memories in which you’re taught to appreciate the language but not really know what’s going on. People see stanzas and line breaks and think, ‘Oh, I’m too stupid to get it.’ They want to think a poem means one thing. But it means what it means—to you.”

A native of Great Neck who studied at and actually graduated from all of Colgate, the California Institute of the Arts and the Yale School of Drama, Lassell wrote his first verse at the precocious age of eight. “I was sitting in the back of my third grade classroom while my mom was having a teacher conference,” Lassell recalls, his voice lilting into the cadences of childhood. “I made a drawing of a little brook in a little landscape with little trees.  Mom and the teacher still weren’t done, so I wrote a poem. It had the word beyond in it. That’s all I remember.  Knowing the word beyond.”

A native Briton of Cypriot descent, Georgiou trained as a dancer before embarking on a performing and teaching career. Under the illusion she might obtain “a marketable skill,” she emigrated to New York and enrolled at Hunter College, where she promptly fell in love with poetry.

“Audre [Lorde] had become too sick to teach,” Georgiou recalls. “And Melinda Goodman took over for her. She gave me my first poem to read.” Today, Georgiou teaches tomorrow’s bards at Hunter and her former teacher is a contributor to The World in Us. Like her co‑editor, Georgiou’s poetic memories extend far back in life.

“When I was a child, my aunt had a very weak heart. Doctors said that having children would be a real risk. But she took the risk, had the baby and came home fine. During a visit home, I showed my first poem to my family and my aunt said, ‘Do you remember when you wrote me a poem?’ I actually wrote her a poem when she came out of hospital. And I had completely forgotten.”

But the work collected in The World In Us is very unlikely to be forgotten. Thanks to a brilliant decision by Lassell and Georgiou, the poetry is organized alphabetically by author, so readers can skip about with no fear they might miss something or worrying that they must finish reading one writer before exploring another.

“You can just open it to a random page,” Lassell says. “Or you can start at the beginning and read straight through. We didn’t need an editorial comment on whose work resembles whose or what something means. The readers will get it. They’ll decide for themselves. “