Kanye West the Poet?

Doing his best to restore his damaged image, singer and rapper Kayne West has vowed in his blog to finally push through with his derailed next album in 2010 and compared himself to poets after his infamous blunder at the 2009 Video Music Awards forced him to withdraw voluntarily from the limelight.

Many were surprised when West unexpectedly grabbed the microphone from Taylor Swift as she was giving her acceptance speech for the Best Female Video award. West interrupted Swift to declare that Beyonce is the best female video artist of all time.

In his blog, West announced that he is resuming the recording of his next album and he compared himself to poets Maya Angelou and Gil Scott-Heron and singer-activist Nina Simone. He declared that while many rappers tend to become worse in time, true poets tend to get better as they age.

He explained that poets and artists have to represent events in their works so that when those who have the power want to rewrite history, people can always depend on their works to learn what had really happened.

However, the question remains whether West can be considered to be a true poet. This is a difficult question to answer and may only be answered in time because it is the people who will finally be the judge on whether West is really an artist and a poet.

Perhaps, a substantial number of people still believe that West has made important contributions at least to music if not to poetry because he has nominations to six awards at the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards to be held on January 31, 2010.

And because songs may be considered as poetry, especially when they express a person’s feelings, perhaps there is some weight to West’s claim that he is a poet.