Marcus Myers: Thanks again, Katherine, for these gorgeous images for our cover and spring 2025 issue. Let’s start with your Flock of Words sequence and process. Does the whole project originate with word or  image? 

 

Katherine Kallas: Flock of Words was born from a poem I wrote, centered around themes of growth and reflection. When I work three-dimensionally, I usually start with a 2D poem. Some poems want to stay 2D, and some want to become 3D. Flock of Words wanted to be 3D, so it became a matter of how to fragment or transform the original poem in its new form. Sculpture, for me, is part of the editing process—it helps me understand the language in a tangible way.

 

MM: This is so fascinating, Katherine. While some of our readers and contributing poets are likely also visual artists, it's unlikely too many are. Still, if I can speak for every kind of poet and poetry, I'm sure every poet published in Bear Review can appreciate the impulse to see their language take shape or literal form. For most of us, the best we can do is render poems from visual art. Poet Mary Jo Bang, for example, has an absolutely wondrous poem from the early aughts titled "The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Moves Toward Infinity." Bang’s piece is after a lithograph, "plate one," by Odlin Redon with a similar title, from a sequence of lithographic plates titled “To Edgar Poe.” 

 

What fascinates me about this piece (and Bang's whole project in the collection this piece originally appears) in particular and ekphrasis in general: the ways in which the poem, without a doubt, becomes an outlet for the wonder and joy the poet experiences while powering up, via the artist's extraordinary vision, the ordinary rendering poets do from writing figuratively, conventionally and materially, on a flat paper or digital surface area for two-dimensional symbols. Or the lines of verse are spoken and heard on the air, invisibly and, unlike a gull at least imagined above the sand and waves, unseen. We poets take accumulated sounds and connotations from letters, words, phrases, clauses and in our material spaces for some future audience, and we order them just so before breaking them into lines and stanzas. In so doing, we internalize or quickly process images within the imagination, which we experience as in a three-dimensional mental model of our vast, historically-rooted and not-fully conscious world of facts, concepts, systems and values, as well as the unspeakable entirety of the real one we cannot fully sense or measure, and we put them into descriptions of varying emotional and cognitive depths and densities. What I'm stumbling over syntax to say: in poetry without the foundation of a visual piece, what's deeply felt or thought is first seen in the mind's eye of the poet. But in the case of ekphrais, the reader follows not only all the inward looking at the Redon piece that Bang did, but also all the inward looking Redon did. In this way, the reader follows a dovetailed visual flight through consciousness (the mind, heart and gut of both processes) as they wrap each artist’s way of looking and reimagining and -constructing into one expression. The first is almost wholly emotional and cognitive but given form by the world’s shapes and materiality, while the other is almost wholly material in form but driven by emotions and thinking we find within line, shading, shape and figure, if this all makes any kind of convoluted sense? If I'm not both oversimplifying and complicating an understanding you and your community of visual artists find a no-brainer in an old hat?

 

In this context, which was difficult for me to unpack (!), I find my question, finally: what's it like as a ceramics artist as you look into your poem, into your self's expression, and see the full shape? Is this a tangible and tactile experience, one in which you imagine depth and breadth from your imagery and description? 

 

KK: Thank you so much for sharing the Mary Jo Bang poem—it is such a striking example of ekphrasis as a space for both observation and transformation. I appreciate you bringing that into the conversation; it’s a powerful reminder of how visual and literary forms, to speak to what you've articulated, can echo and inform one another.

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While I’m not a ceramics artist by discipline, I have used ceramics among a range of materials in my visual practice, including paper, wire, collage, and found objects. I do often experience my poems as having shape, depth, and physical presence—as forms that exist beyond language. Visual thinking allows me to imagine the poem spatially, to sense its structure and weight as something tangible.

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Having a visual practice has absolutely expanded how I understand poetry. It’s helped me recognize that a poem can exist beyond the confines of the page—that it can occupy physical space, interact with materiality, and be shaped by more than just language. Often, the poem itself seems to indicate what form it wants to take. A more nostalgic or delicate piece might find itself constructed in paper, while something more grounded or tactile might take shape in ceramic.

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There’s something uniquely powerful about physically shaping language. When I build letters out of clay, for instance, I’m not only giving the poem a physical presence—I’m also allowing it to change in the process. The relationship between the reader (or viewer) and the work shifts entirely when a poem becomes an object. In critique settings or exhibitions, people sometimes engage with the words as visual form rather than text. I don’t find this frustrating—it’s simply a different way of experiencing the work. It expands how meaning can be made, suggesting that poetry can be seen, felt, and understood in ways that aren’t always tied to traditional reading.

 

MM: What other possibilities do you foresee with regards to the cross pollination of making your poems and visual art? 

 

KK: I see a lot of potential in continuing to blur the boundaries between poem and object—especially in ways that emphasize time, storytelling, and shared experience. Much of my work already lives in a time-based space,  it is about duration, accumulation, and the way narrative unfolds over time—whether that’s in how someone moves through a sculptural installation, reads a fragmented text, or engages with a layered environment that slowly reveals itself.

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I’m also drawn to the idea of shared spaces of interpretation—how meaning can shift depending on who’s encountering the work, and when, and how others relate and interact with the narratives I share. I’m interested in how a poem or object can hold multiple readings, shaped by memory, context, and point of view. I want the work to leave room for openness, uncertainty, and personal meaning-making.

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Recently in my visual work, I've been exploring more ephemeral elements—things like translucency, shadow, and light—as ways of creating tension between what’s seen and what’s withheld. Those qualities feel aligned with how language operates for me: sometimes revealing, sometimes obscuring. I think there’s a lot still to discover in that in-between space, where poetry and visual form aren’t just in conversation but are actively reshaping one another.

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Ultimately, I’m not trying to translate a poem into a visual piece or vice versa—I’m more interested in what happens when each form challenges and expands the other. That space of transformation feels like where the most interesting questions are.

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MM: Thank you, Katherine, for these insights into your visual and written work. It has been edifying to read your thoughts and a privilege to publish them in the spring 2025 issue. And thanks for sharing your flocks of words pieces as well as the visual pieces by your talented friends and acquaintances, current students and graduates from the Kansas City Art Institute, these past two issues. Our readers, editors and I can look forward to following your careers. And no doubt we can look forward to saying we’d met you before you became famous.

KK: Thank you so much, Marcus, for your kind words and for the opportunity to share my work in the spring ‘25 issue. It’s been an honor to contribute alongside such thoughtful editors and to spotlight the work of my peers from the Kansas City area. I am excited to be a part of it!!