In First Book, Edina Teacher Pens Poems of Startling, Lovely, Morbid Beauty

If you’re Edina poet Van Anderson, your dreams are populated by unnamed dead infants. A stirring passage of music causes you to erupt suddenly in tears. Ridding your lawn of leaves reminds you of raking lice out of children’s hair. An encounter with a diving Red-winged Blackbird during a walk in the park summons to your mind the image of jet fighters flying low over rows of trees.

When Anderson taught English at Edina High School, a post he held for 12 years before retiring in 2011, he liked to start class with a “warm-up activity.” Anderson would pick an ordinary classroom object—a table, a pencil, a piece of chalk—and ask students to meditate on the thing, jotting down impressions of its design, its purpose, its physical attributes.

“You’ve got to open your eyes to seeing beyond, beyond, beyond,” he said last Tuesday during a reading at the Galleria Barnes and Noble from “Tending the Garden,” his first book of published poems. “What do you finally know? That image of beauty that is here”—he measures a small swath of air with his forefingers—“that long.”

Anderson wrote his first stanzas in college and never stopped through the past five decades, filling an arm’s-length shelf in his home with poems, prose and diaries while publishing a few choice selections in small literary journals. Between the poems, he’s supported himself through teaching jobs, freelance work, a medical editing gig and a stint in the Peace Corps. And he’s spent many hours toiling in his garden and bringing up his three children (“Children are types of plants, anyway,” he said. “You have to raise them.”)

For Anderson, gardening is a fine metaphor for life.

“‘Tending the Garden’ is tending what’s important to you and what you have around you and what’s inside to see it,” he said.

His silvery, vermicelli hair; the high, gentle, donnish timber of his voice; the perpendicular posture; the stabbing and prolonged gaze from behind his thick-lensed, distorting glasses—all combine to give an impression of a man who loves people but maybe finds himself more at home surrounded by soil.

“The dance of light and shade beneath this tree/is all I need to know eternity,” he writes in one poem. Elsewhere: “We’re always and forever in the now.”

The world’s oldest garden figures heavily in “Tending.” In his poems, and in conversation, he doles out praise for those who escape Eden.

“The students have left Eden and are on their search for knowledge,” he said.

But he sees a societal trend of people wanting to return to the dumb, numb bliss of Eden.

“Eden is all over the place in our advertising,” he said. “So many ads in magazines and on TV— paradise is always there—tempting you to ‘buy this, purchase this,’ so it’s always a tantalizing image in people’s minds. It’s a symbolic place, [but] you’re not going to get back in.”

Christina Kosters was one of several of Anderson’s students in attendance at his reading last week.

Kosters, a 2011 Edina High graduate, said she thinks every day about Anderson and his lessons on the beauty of the commonplace.