Rappers and MC's

[Truerenigma]

I have poems posted here that on stage, I perform as raps. Are they no longer poems then? Or were they never poems, just raps in disguise?

That's easy. They are both. You can be a rapper and a poet. Being a rapper doesn't mean you're poet though, nor vice versa. a rap's not a poem. the success depends more on the performance than what is written. it doesn't even matter how the words are supposed to be pronounced, but how the rapper pronounces them. a good performer will always be more successful as a rapper than a good writer, and DOESN'T EVEN NEED TO WRITE HIS RAPS> SHIT> HE COULD HIRE A POET, and often does.

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I suppose that my point would be that while poetry does aspire towards the musical, music doesn't necessarily need to aspire to poetry. Music came before literature. A song doesn't need to stand as literature, it reaches for something more primal, less cognisant, more profound, which is why poetry reaches for music in the same way that music reaches for dance.

Let's not judge value.
The written words, the lyrics of anything, can be regarded as literature.

Poetry, if we ignore those using the synonymous that means nothing (as poems), is the use of language, born before the written text. You do not need to write anything down to use poetry - so the lyrics use poetic devices. They are not poems because poems is a written form of text, without doubt derivative of oral form, but once put in a paper they are a written work.
You can even call the lyrics alone a poem, but that is misleading. First, one musician works his words to be sung, they are mixed with the tunes, etc. They are complete as a song, just like the pictures of a movie, despite a movie being pictures in sequence, are not a movie. Another thing, music happened before the literature, if you take an art with her own power (Music) and call the work of this art (the song, which lyrics is a part) and his artist (the musician) as another literature, you are causing an inversion of value - A performer must be regarded with all his power as performer. It is status enough. Raps rely mostly on the performer's charisma, and what is called creating "hype" (basically self-promotion, and and following/creating popular trends) for their success, and are far more popular than poets.

They could be called poetry, since poetry is a form of language.
They are not poems, which is a form of text. If you try to transform every other art (in this kind music) to literature, you will just downgrade the value of those arts.

And rap is music. Some may say that a rapper "speaks" his lines, but I disagree. It is fit to a musical measure, and relies on things like vocal tones that cannot be conveyed without performance. If a rapper's tone is off, and he/she is offbeat, it will kill the rap.

I do not disagree that a good lyric, some of them, are exceptional and have strong literary values - I am saying they have also musical values because they are complete as songs.

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A rap could be a poem.
What that is supposed to mean, that a form of expression can be transformed to another form of expression? What is new about that?

Also the reader/writer relationship is far different from the performer/listener relationship. Writing a poem is a little more like leaving some strange object on a trail that you're not sure if anyone will go down.