The Mayhem Poets, a spoken word trio, performed for a mixed crowd of middle school, high school and college students in the University of Northern Iowa’s Gallagher-Bluedorn Performing Arts Center Thursday.

The group gave a more intimate sample of their poetry and discussed writing and their backgrounds in the art in the Center for Multicultural Education later that afternoon.

Brought to the University of Northern Iowa through the GBPAC’s Kaleidoscope Series for Youth, the Mayhem Poets performance was free for UNI students.

Hailing from New York City, the Mayhem Poets are made up of three men who each found poetry in their own way. Kyle “Black Skeptik” Sutton, Scott Raven and Mason Granger are the guys behind the verses. Rutgers University served as the common thread to sew the group together.

Sutton wasn’t always a fan of poetry though. Throughout school, he found a disconnect with the literature, not seeing how it was applicable to his life. It wasn’t until he found rap that he could appreciate poetry.

“The teachers weren’t making any connection. There was no gateway drug,” Sutton said.

According to Sutton, the first time he really wrote poetry was because of an influential teacher at his high school. At a school dance, Sutton caught his girlfriend kissing his good friend, a jock, outside. This spurred Sutton and his friends to escalate the situation and fight.

Sutton’s teacher stopped him, handed him a piece of paper and a pencil, and told him to write how he was feeling. Through the rage and tears, Sutton was able to release and get rid of his anger. Instead of fighting, he went home.

From that point on, he was a poetry fiend.

Raven and Granger have slightly different backgrounds in poetry. Raven was an athlete and theatre buff throughout high school. In college though, he tore his already weak ACL and was no longer able to participate. He instead found himself wanting to obtain all types of experiences in college. He even went as far as to sing at a Vietnamese karaoke night.

Granger, on the other hand, was a self-described “nerd-with-an-attitude” in high school, scoring extremely high on the SAT and a perfect score on the New Jersey High School Proficiency Test’s math portion without putting forth much effort. It wasn’t until college he learned about slam poetry. For a class, he had to attend a poetry slam and seeing the opportunity as a free date with a girl he was interested in, he went. After the slam, it was love at first sight for poetry.

At Rutgers, Sutton created a poetry open mic of his own titled “Verbal Mayhem” from his dorm room. Raven joined in and helped promote and participated in Verbal Mayhem, attempting to get a widely diverse group of people to share their personal takes on poetry. Granger was one of those drawn in and eventually took over the open mic after Sutton and Raven left school.

Once out of college, Sutton and Raven started touring their poetry from very humble beginnings. After getting a consistent flow to operations, the two invited Granger to join them in their tour. Thus, the Mayhem Poets were born.

The group travels now travels all across the United States performing shows for students, with a focus on promoting poetry as an art form again. They bring age-appropriate poetry to adult issues, like racism, while teaching the mechanics of poetry, like meter and form.

“We’re like the hip-hop Teletubbies but cool,” Granger said.

The poets took questions from a small audience at the CME about how they write poetry. They explained how group poems are authored. According to them, it’s all about conflict. Instead of coming together and nicely hashing out differences, they pick poems apart until they are perfect with no-holdsbarred mentalities.

Also, they spoke about the importance of being well-rounded artistically.

“Have deep, personal poems and have poems that celebrate the random, simple things, like farting,” Sutton said.

The Mayhem Poets have a full schedule ahead of them. All three members, along with touring, are working on side projects. Sutton has a rap CD debuting, Raven is acting professionally and Granger has a book coming out that illustrates poetry. The tour isn’t ending anytime soon though, with a stop in Wisconsin Oct. 18, and a run through many schools in Minnesota for a month afterwards.