As modern poetry has often been stereotyped as focusing primarily on subjective concerns, this week’s RTF guest lecturer Hall Gardner will lecture briefly on the simple, but seemingly overlooked, fact that geopolitical issues and wars have influenced poets at least since the oral histories of “Homer” and the late Beowolf poet., among many others. He will then read some modern work dealing with geopolitics and war… And will then recite a few of his own geo-poetical protest poems.
Speaker Bio: Novels, Poetry, and Books on Geopolitics by Hall Gardner
Hall Gardner is an international relations theorist, editorialist, TV commentator, poet and novelist. Gardner’s first book of poems, The Wake-Up Blast (2008), represents 30 years of poetic protest. https://www.hallgardner.com/the-wake-up-blast A second book of poems, A Sub-Urban Landscape (Un-paisaje-sub-urbano) translated into Spanish by Camila Rocca Toro, has been published by Edition Rocca (2025), https://www.librerianacional.com/un-paisaje-sub-urbano/p?srsltid=AfmBOoro0Sa38kCFMcEtZVJtrWxi9M_bnjDX8_xGUmOgaPNf5bwGzMTz
Hall Gardner’s book of poems, Cette nouvelle Grande Lutte des Ténèbres a-t-elle déjà commencé ? translated into French by Marion Winter, will be published by Pantheon Books in the Fall.
His first novel, Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors (Edition Noema, Ibidem-Verlag / Colombia University Press, 2023) explores in literary form the social and geopolitical transformations taking place in China and the world at the time of the Chinese democracy movement (April-June 1989). https://cup.columbia.edu/book/year-of-the-earth-serpent-changing-colors-a-novel/9783838202426/
The sequel, Year of the Horseshoe Bat—in Exile, was published in 2024, likewise by Edition Noema, Ibidem-Verlag/ Colombia University Press. The protagonist, Chia Pao-yu—a Chinese dissident who was rumored to have been executed in China in the first novel after leading protests on Tiananmen Square―escapes to France to find that “freedom” was not exactly as he hoped.. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/year-of-the-horseshoe-bat/9783838219066/
Hall Gardner’s first two books on global geopolitics, Surviving the Millennium (1994) and Dangerous Crossroads (1997) forewarned of a dangerous Russian backlash, war with Ukraine, and the possibility of major power war if the U.S., NATO, and the European Union could not implement a new system of European Security that incorporated Russian security concerns. His later books include Toward an Alternative Transatlantic Strategy (2021); IR Theory, Historical Analogy and Major Power War (2019); World War Trump (2018); Crimea, Global Rivalry and the Vengeance of History (2015); NATO Expansion and the U.S. Strategy in Asia (2013); Averting Global War (2007), and American Global Strategy and the “War on Terrorism” (2005).
Hall Gardner’s American Myopia: The Failure of US Global Strategy and the Risks of Major Power War will be published by Bloomsbury in the Fall.