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