Platica Y Poetics S4E6- Octavio Quintanilla

Episode 6, Season 4: Dr. Octavio Quintanilla Grey cumulus clouds hung low like a soft, familiar plush blanket, as an heirloom passed down to keep us warm through dark days. In this intimate plática, poetic creation stories were bestowed as a gift by Texas Poet Laureate Dr. Octavio Quintanilla as he reflected on who he is as an artist, tracing the ways poems emerge from image, ritual, and lived experience. A fluid space unfolded between visual art and language as Quintanilla spoke of his interdisciplinary practice, where FRONTEXTOS ‘arte fronteriza,’ art born from the in-between and the border, and wordplay become entry points for poetry to exist through shape, color, and form. He shared how poems often arrive through acts of looking, how journals hold the first raw gestures of language, and how art and text converse and transform into a living manifestation on both canvas and page. Our conversation turned to his acclaimed book Las Horas Imposibles, a work that holds grief, love, memory, and bilingual intimacy as artistic necessity, reflecting on “impossible hours”, those unspeakable moments poetry is called into action, and on the lessons found in darkness, vulnerability, and shedding. As both former San Antonio Poet Laureate and current Texas Poet Laureate, he spoke of poetry as an essential lifeline for survival, community-building, and cultural resistance. Our plática closed with a shared acknowledgment that all is in constant evolution—thoughts, responses, beginnings, endings. We are the evolution, the internal revolution. The future of poetics is a camino unknown, an uncharted lyrical and prose territory. What remains constant is the irreplaceable power of human connection and observation. Darkness, he reminds us, is one of our greatest teachers; the light exists and always will, but only if we are willing to sit, listen, and observe what darkness has to say