Three poets travel as a team to bring spoken word to the masses.

The Mayhem Poets are rare birds in the arts landscape. They are also a trio of poets – spoken word poets of clever, dexterous and topical lines – and even rarer is that they are successful. Not just successful in the realms of awards (though they won a Microsoft grant for $100,000 in 2006) or in accolades (The New York Times called their show an “amazing ride”) or in affirmation (one of them collaborated with KRS-One). They’ve been successful in that they seem to have found a way to keep doing what they love doing – inspiring the presence of poetry in people’s everyday lives, especially young people.

And they are good at it, flipping lyrical tongue twisters and going off on surprising tangents, like the poem they concocted in which they add one word apiece, constructing lines like notes on a scale, and subtly changing the verbiage of the classic “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck” until it’s morphed into “If a woodchuck chucked cheese, would a woodchuck work at Chuck E. Cheese?”

They are coming to do their thing at Sunset Center’s Studio 105 Tuesday, Feb. 24. They are co-founders Kyle Sutton, who goes by the stage name Kyle Rapps, and Scott Tarazevits, who goes by the stage name Scottt Raven, and Mason Granger. They met at Rutgers, where they first formed and in 1999 started a weekly poetry slam called Verbal Mayhem, named after the subversive Project Mayhem collective in the film Fight Club.

And like any super team, they each come with unique backstories which feed into their respective lyrical powers.

Let’s start with Granger, the newest member of the trio. He mastered his SATs and showed a gift for math, but decided to study creative writing at Rutgers, where he hosted Verbal Mayhem for three years. He’s got lightning-quick reflexes and a mathematical mind which helped him create a poetry slam-tracking app called SlamFind.

Raven incorporates his Jewish identity – “Shabbat speeches and histrionic-filled haftorah readings” – his study of theater and journalism, and his writing and acting. He’s co-authored two spoken-word plays and studied improv with Upright Citizens Brigade, and dunks it all into the well from which he draws out his poetry. Along the way, he published a book of sonnets dedicated to his failed relationships with women.

Rapps came from hard knocks in New Jersey, steeped in hip-hop music from Jay-Z, Notorious B.I.G., Nas, Pharcyde, Hieroglyphics and A Tribe Called Quest. He got caught up with drugs and alcohol and started acting out a destructive course before he hit the brakes and found slam poetry at 17 when he needed it most. The 34-year-old has been sober since and has gone on to collaborate with Talib Kweli, Crazy Legs of Rocksteady Crew, and one of his heroes, KRS-One.

They have a mission.

“We want societal change, social reform. We want to fight for community empowerment, female empowerment, immigration [reform], wealth distribution,” Rapps says. “We get to do that from the artists’ perspective, but we’re hired by people in schools who want to see reform.”

They’re visiting Bayview Academy, All Saints, Seaside Middle School and Walter Colton Middle School to spread the good word about poetry as part of the Sunset Center’s 7-year-old Classroom Connections program. Then the kids will come to Sunset Center for an exclusive engagement.

The poets will reach 800 local school kids this way.

“We like to show [kids] that poetry can be fun,” Rapps says. “We like to show them it’s relatable, by using pop culture references and rap music especially. We try to give them hope, tell them a little bit about our experiences in middle school and the challenges we’ve dealt with. We want to show them we respect them.”

For instance, he has worked through the pain of losing his mother, whom he calls his champion, to cancer in 2006 (the same year they won the Microsoft grant). Raven, he says, works in his own insecurities and flaws, which Rapps calls “brave.” And Granger has been out front about calling out religious hypocrisy.

“We’ve pissed off some churches we’ve performed in where we’ve called them out,” Rapps says. “The art we’re doing, sometimes there are some painful truths about society and painful truths about ourselves. That’s what the artist’s job is.”

But they are good at reading their surroundings, so their performances before an audience of kids will no doubt hover in the area of inspirational. The message for them will be: “We love them. We’re with them. We’re on their team.”

They maintain packed touring dates at colleges, detentions centers, cancer wards, groups homes, teacher workshops, churches, performance halls and parks, an itinerary that casts them as troubadours. They’ve performed for audiences from all over the world.

“Everyone is welcome to partake, whether a prisoner behind bars, young kids growing up in well-to-do areas, in the ghetto or a beautiful gated community,” Rapp says. “We all have that humanness you can tap into.”

As for the Tuesday public performance, expect anything. Except timidity.

MAYHEM POETS perform 7pm Tuesday, Feb. 24, at Sunset Center’s Studio 105, Ninth and San Carlos, Carmel. $20-$30. 620-2048, www.SunsetCenter.org