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
