Art Academy Professor Matt Hart has a new book out from Typecast Publishing titled Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless.  The book weaves together references to punk rock, various philosophical positions and poetic ideas with meditations/reflections/bombs going off as a way to address something of what it is to be alive right now.  Here's what Typecast Publishing says:

"I woke up/this morning to a world cataclysmic/in the ordinary ways." And this world in Matt Hart's Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless, operates in stereo. In its right speaker: the melody of a male vocalist who feels literally beside himself, constantly observing each of life's interactions while also ferociously experiencing them, yelling Emerson and Whitman and Kant into the mic. In the left blares the bass lines of Jawbreaker, Alice Cooper, and the yawps of Patti Smith. "One can't be out-of- control-in control," writes Hart, and with a righteous blending of pulpit fervor and mosh pit frenzy, these poems feed upon the friction of life's contradictions and our hunger for absolutes, setting up the reader to discover "nothing is perfectly nailed to the wall." Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless is an epic call for magnificence and truth from a remarkable poet at his finest.

Matt Hart's band Travel has also made a 14 song record, Blank Sermons...Relentless Lectures that uses cut-up versions of the poems in the book as lyrics.

In celebration of Matt's book and record release, the Art Academy will host a party on Saturday, April 14, 7-10 pm. in the Student Commons. The event will feature readings by Matt, poet Nate Pritts, AAC faculty Ken Henson and Christy Schellhas, and several current and former AAC students, including Avril Thurman, Alexander Giehl, Matthew Tanner Browne, Millie Ferguson, Samantha McCormick, Billy Golden and Ethan Schultz.  Additionally, the Travel record will be played in its entirety, and there may even be a surprise musical performance...  Join us for food, drinks, music and words!  The Art Academy Community as well as the general public are invited!

You can order the book, download the record, or the book and a download of the record directly from

Typecast