From a conversation with Carl Phillips at Kenyon Review:

CP: .........from my window is all forest—many acres of conservation land. I really became keen on fields when I moved to the Midwest and started going out into the landscape with my partner, Doug, who was always looking for good photos at sunset. Fields became something I could love in the way that I love the ocean when I’m out East. 

About holiness, I don’t know that I can think of holiness as anything more than how we choose to invest a space with—variously—belief, the will to believe, the refusal to have a thing be “merely” what it is. . . . I know that’s a little vague. 

DB: Then let me ask a related, maybe larger question about this subject. What is the connection for you between the world—with its multitudes, its failures and damages and beauties, all of its secular and natural particularities—and the sacred?
CP: Well, again, I’m uneasy about concepts of the sacred and of holiness. If I believe in the sacred at all, it’s more in the sense of finding something to have a sacred sort of resonance for me—maybe this is something like the sublime? In the sudden scattering of leaves from a tree, I feel something sacred, but I don’t think the moment itself has sacred value, that it’s a sign—I’m not a Transcendentalist or anything. . . . I want to believe that things mean more than they do. But I have my doubts. But I want to believe that my doubts might also mean more than they do. 

DB: Yes, this does sound like the sublime—the awareness of beauty so immense or amorphous that we fear for our safety or sanity. And it is related to the transcendental, especially if that term can suggest something other than the conventionally religious. Maybe instead of the religious, we are talking about the ineffable or the numinous—the thing suggested beyond the thing in front of us.
You say you feel uncomfortable with these concepts. But they are..... a central part of your poetic, your language, even your method of figuration. I think I mean your amazing capability to suggest that-which-is-beyond presence or the present moment. Maybe again we’re talking about the deepest operation of metaphor, the exchange of thing for thing, or the association of thing for thing. Would that be in the ballpark?
CP: I hope I won’t sound like I’m being difficult, if I say that these things are not tropes, for me, they’re just how I think and what I think. I guess they become tropes, for readers, once the poem exists, but for me there’s not very much separation between the poem and the life behind it. 

DB: So do you think metaphor itself is a kind of holiness? Or is that going too far? I know some of your favorite forebears—Herbert and Donne, Dickinson and Hopkins—would likely make that association between metaphor and the sacred.
CP: I don’t think metaphor itself is a kind of holiness—but I believe that the ability to see in terms of metaphor is a special kind of vision. In that sense, I lean towards the ancient Greco-Roman idea of the vatic, the way in which access to certain kinds of vision can be viewed as a kind of holiness.