Course:Presence - Brittany Howard

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CRWR 501P 003
Advanced Writing of Poetry
  • Instructor:Dr. Bronwen Tate
  • Email: Bronwen.tate@ubc.ca
  • Office: Buchanan E #456
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“Come what made

I have you today

And I dont want to more”

Her songs read as poems. Her voice is both blue and kind, like the way a friend garbs your hands and holds them through troubles. What I love about Britany is how she captures grief then pours it our of her heart and right under your feet. Like she is telling us here is my pain, you deal with it. Or here is my pain tell me you do not feel the same. This is a song about love and loss. About loving a moment knowing you will lose it, or visiting this moment in memory knowing it has been forever maimed by it ending. My ex-partner once told me that she is inspired by the loss of her sister. I believe that, I never really searched for confirmation. The feeling is enough. I remember first hearing it and feeling this typical clutch then stab into the chest from the pain of loss, but this time you choose to feel it, to relish the knife twisting, to hold her hand and twist some more. Because this much pain can only come from love.

“And I dont want tomorrow

It promises or its aches”

There is also joy somehow. Perhaps joy from comfort. From camaraderie. From knowing that someone will hear this and know someone else is there with them, it their loneliness and their pain.

I found out about the death of the first person I loved a month after it happened. They lived away. In Canada ironically. It was a year after Covid-19 started. They informed me of their second diagnosis months before, we kept a habit of sending long voice notes to each other. A month after them breaking the news I confessed that I never stopped loving them really and they did the same. More than a month before their death they gave me news that they are close to remission or perhaps that is what I chose to understand. But when the lag between my message and his response stretched further than what became usual, I did some digging and digitally broke myself the news. There is no real evidence of our relationship, none of my friends ever met them, we dated so briefly, then became friends and then they left. The only thing I have is this long string of voice notes that I kept listening to on repeat that morning and crying. Inconsolable. Perhaps to this day.

“By doin' nothing, I noticed something

I don't want no more

And I've always wanted more

Of just about everything”

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