This year, National Poetry Month could be renamed Octavio Quintanilla Month in San Antonio.
Quintanilla, who served as San Antonio’s poet laureate from 2018 to 2020, will be represented in three exhibitions of poetic prowess in April, at Our Lady of the Lake University, the Mexican Cultural Institute and as part of Urban-15’s annual Mega Corazón online poetry event.
Challenging narratives
Quintanilla, along with other former poets laureate Carmen Tafolla and Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson, was in attendance for the April 15 investiture ceremony for San Antonio’s newest poet laureate Eduardo “Eddie” Vega.
In introducing Vega, Mayor Ron Nirenberg said, “artists and the art they create are critical to telling the story of our people, our places, our history, and our culture. Artists challenge standard narratives to create new approaches to view ourselves as a city.”
During Quinatanilla’s term, he challenged the standard narrative of what poetry can be by creating a series of visual poems he dubbed Frontextos — a Spanish language portmanteau combining the words for border and text.
“I was writing in notebooks, so it was just natural to start sketching, and doodling. The Frontextos came out of that process, and they slowly became visual poems,” he said.
The Frontextos blur the line between traditional verse poetry and painting. Some incorporate text, others use recognizable imagery, while many are abstract.
Emotional landscapes
Quintanilla wrote in 2019 that as he began his term as poet laureate, he realized he’d made too many excuses not to write. He was “teaching too many classes” as a professor of English at Our Lady of the Lake University, and had “too many books to read, not enough time.”
Sketching felt more informal and immediate, and quickly became a daily practice. His first Frontexto, at the time simply titled “Draft 1/Borrador 1,” was posted to his Instagram feed in January 2018, and the flow has not stopped since, with hundreds produced each year.
The practice recalls Quintanilla’s early love of visual art when he’d turn pieces of sheetrock brought home by his construction worker father into paintings. “That’s how I started practicing how to put color and image together,” he said.
Using visual language and working with words is not dissimilar for Quintanilla, who in describing making Frontextos spoke of the “dialogue between colors” and geometric forms.
Making them is “like writing a poem. When you’re writing a poem, you’re always conscious and aware of the architecture of language, how you’re building that poem, and what images you’re using.”
And the colors speak, he said. “Once you use a specific color, you are inviting the viewer to tap into their emotional landscape.”
The Frontextos exhibition at the Mexican Cultural Institute opened Wednesday and runs through April 30.
Our Lady of the Lake University’s Sueltenfuss Library opened its Frontextos exhibition on April 9, with a public reception at 4 p.m. on April 23. The show runs through April 30.
And Quintanilla — along with Vega, Sanderson and many others — participated in Urban-15’s annual Mega Corazón poetry event, viewable online through April 30.
