Quiet Black Noise: A Poetics of Black Interiority

Quiet Black Noise is a practice-based PhD submission comprising two elements: a creative work in the form of Quiet, a full-length poetry collection, and a critical exploration that engages with and furthers the ideas presented within the poetry manuscript. The critical counterpart examines how a black interior poetics animates the poems, such that it becomes possible for them to occupy a prismatic, threefold position consisting variously of responses to theory, enactments of theory, and sites of theory-making. Using Kevin Quashie’s text, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012), as a foundation, the poems and thesis interrogate how ideas of blackness, introspection, privacy, intimacy and collective and individual liberation intersect, ultimately arguing that the interior is indispensable not just to black life and wellbeing, but to the integrity of human experience. The poems experiment unrestrictedly with form, voice, vocabulary, registers and modes of address, whilst the critical counterpart employs metaphor as a central methodology: a vehicle for meaning-making that attends to Lorraine O’Grady’s assertion that art is ‘a system for uncovering the unexpected’ (Duke University Press, 2020). The submission is a hybrid exchange across forms, with the thesis at times assuming a tenor of prose poetry whilst several poems in turn embody an essayistic form or directly reference critical texts. The work is intended to be received as congruent and fluid; capable of approaching the subject matter from several angles, blurring the boundaries between theory and practice in a manner that reflects the workings of the black interior poetics that it holds at its heart.