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You're listening to Away With Words, the show about language and how we use it. I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett. I've always been a voracious reader, but recently I find myself drawn to one genre in particular, and that's poetry.

And it sort of crept up on me. I just

noticed the other day that every single book on my nightstand was poetry, like Natasha Trethaway and

Katie Ford and Billy Collins, Audrey and Rich and Kay Ryan. And I'm not sure why I'm gravitating

toward poetry above all the other forms, but I'm thinking that maybe part of it is that we talk so often on the show about grammar.

And poetry pushes against the rules of grammar.

And I think because of that, it's a great way to learn how to do any kind of writing better.

I think poetry is such a great teacher.

You know, you spend some time with it,

and you realize how much the style in which you say something

can make your writing pack so much more of a punch,

even when you're writing prose.

And Grant recently, I'm hearing about more and more teachers

who are using the poetry of hip-hop lyrics

to teach writing in the classroom,

they're building on that poetry that their students already love. And so much of hip-hop really is

poetic, isn't it? It is poetic. There's a couple things to say to this. One is, if I can flatter

...