Several of your poems concern words as visual artifacts, drawing from illuminated manuscripts or typography. How did you discover this reverence for beauty and workmanship, for the “divine detail”?

For as long as I can remember I’ve had a very strong sense of what you term “divine detail” in the world — beginning perhaps with my realization that the butter my grandmother made in the mountains of Virginia tasted incredibly different than the store-bought butter I ate at home in suburban Maryland. And the ham. And the potatoes. In my Uncle Osie’s chair factory, I watched unremarkable lengths of walnut turned on lathes to become the legs and rungs and backs of chairs, and I followed my Aunt Evelyn out in the dark at 5 a.m. to milk the cows in the muddy barn, then watched her pour the milk through a dish towel clothes-pinned over the top of the separator as the milk and cream went their separate ways. Those, too, tasted like things from another world, a world I could partake of by means of those things. Above all, my sense was always that there was a connection between who these people were, the lives they lived, and the “divine details” that made up those lives. But even though I experienced all of this and carried it inside me, I could never take it with me, transport it to and evoke those experiences in any other place.

And then there was the Baptist church — the hymns, the prayers, the communion, the scripture, the hellfire and damnation sermons, and the revivals: the insistent belief in metaphor and symbol and language, and the insistent conviction that there is a connection between this world and some “other.” All of this, too, made clear that the “divine details” — of a life, of the world, of language — were in fact a means of transport or, more precisely, that to partake of those “divine details” was to be already in the process of transport and translation.

Much later I encountered Goethe and his belief that nature is the living visible garment of God, along with the British and American Romantics — especially Blake, with his inexhaustible attempts to make language and imagination and visual art into a more profound inhabitation of experience, and Emerson’s essay “Nature,” too, with its amazing image of the “transparent eyeball” one could become while out in nature, where the currents of the human and the universe could mingle and inform each other.