Greetings from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. It’s just about Valentines’ Day here at the Cato College of Education and love is in the air. To kick off this new column on literacies — yes, that’s plural, which I’ll explain — I’m going to write about Pablo Neruda and teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) at Cardozo Senior High School, Washington DC.
The three-story Downton-Abbeyesque red brick and limestone structure known today as “Cardozo Education Campus” was designed by William B. Ittner and inaugurated in 1916 as the segregated and all-White “Central High School.” By the middle of the 20th century, the building had become one of three all-Black high schools in the city and was renamed to honor Francis L. Cardozo — South Carolina’s 1868 (Black) Secretary of State.
The school sits on a bluff just three blocks above U. Street. If you’re ever in town, it’s worth the short walk up the hill from the metro station to the school’s parking lot for the breathtaking panorama it affords of the National Mall with the alabaster dome of the U.S. Capitol to the east, the Washington Monument to the west, and in the far distance, the shadows of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers.
I began teaching at Cardozo in August 1995. Just a few months earlier, a movie loosely based on the life of Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda appeared in theatres: Il Postino, or The Postman. Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, or “Pablo Neruda” for short, was born on 12 July 1904 in Santiago, Chile. At 19, he published Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. The slim volume catapulted him to fame and, eventually, a 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Like much of the South American intelligentsia of his generation, Neruda engaged in left-wing politics and even served a term as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. In 1948, with the ascendance of a right-wing government, Neruda fled on horseback to Argentina where he remained for three years as a political exile.
In the Hollywood version, Neruda is living in exile on a small island somewhere off the Italian coast. A postman, Mario, delivers his mail by bicycle every day. The two men become friends. When Mario falls in love with a young woman on the island, Beatrice, he turns to Neruda for the words to make her fall in love him. Neruda obliges.
One hour and 48 minutes later, however, the couple’s love story ends in despair very much like Neruda’s poetry and life. Neruda died shortly after the 1973 coup d’état that would bring Pinochet’s brutal right-wing dictatorship to power for almost two decades. It’s widely held that Pinochet had Neruda poisoned at the hospital where he had just been diagnosed with cancer.
Reminded by the film of the power of Neruda’s poetry, I brought his work into my classroom in that fall of 1995 — copying one poem a week in white chalk on a large blackboard in its original Spanish with an English translation. My students could read both sides; they were mostly Salvadorean newcomers arriving in DC, collateral damage of a 12-year civil war.
Neruda’s poems were new to them and to me, too, and we read Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair out loud together in Spanish and then in English. We even memorized bits and pieces of them to recite, like these:
Tonight, I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, ‘The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight, I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Or like these:
Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.
The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.
Or these:
I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
and you hear me from far away and my voice does not touch you.
It seems as though your eyes had flown away
and it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth.
One of the consequences of multiple decades of data-driven U.S. educational reform has been the proliferation of high-stakes literacy testing. A 2015 report by the Council of the Great City Schools noted that K-12 students today take an average of 115 standardized tests across their public-school trajectories. Consequently, K-12 literacy instruction has increasingly shifted from the sort of arts-based instruction that many of us grew up with to a “science of reading” approach to literacy teaching and learning. That is, we test to identify what our students can and can’t yet do with texts, and we teach or reteach accordingly. Then, we test and measure again, and again, and once more with feeling. There’s not much time for love poetry anymore. It’s not serious enough. Or maybe a parent association might red flag Neruda’s talk about “kissing” and ban his verse from K-12 curricula and library bookshelves completely.
Mechthild Cranston, a Clemson University Professor Emeritus of French, described teaching poetry in the second/foreign language classroom as “scary business” because unlike the memorization of irregular verbs, vocabulary lists, and plot summaries, reading poetry involves risk-taking. But in the case of Neruda, on the third floor of Cardozo Senior High School my students were more than willing to take that risk — maybe because of their access to Twenty Love Poems in the Spanish original, maybe because they too were far from home in a sort of exile, maybe because of the youth they shared with the poet himself, or maybe because it was just all so very beautiful.
The thing is, “reading” a panoramic cityscape or the history of a brick and limestone school building or hearing and receiving a poem of love and despair are all manifestations of literacy. That’s why, in many academic circles, we construe the category in its plural — as literacies. But for many school districts and state and federal agencies the category is exceptionally singular.
It’s all about the test scores. Consequently, the sort of K-12 literacy instruction to which we subjugate our children and youth don’t often recognize anything else beyond reading in the very traditional schoolhouse sense of the category. Now that’s scary business.
So, for this Valentine’s Day 2025, let’s celebrate the plurality of literacies and the plurality of how to read and enact love and despair as the blue stars shiver in the distance and the night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Love is in the air. Can you hear it?
Image: Book hearts photo, Pexels.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Pencils Down! Reading Love and Despair in a Public High School - February 14, 2025
A wonderful anecdote. Let’s hope the current crew in Washington get literate enough to “read” the state of the nation, and realize they’re taking us backward on education and much else.