Jack E Lorts

The Love Songs of Ephram Pratt Jack E Lorts

The Love Songs of Ephram Pratt came about as a result of my meeting Ephram Pratt some ten years ago. I first met Ephram in a poem in 2008; I didn't know him previously & he is not related to a minor historical figure I've since encountered on the Internet. He is, in all likelihood, of the Tribe of Ephraim in the book of Numbers, and I also suppose he may be an alter-ego or doppelgänger of mine who talks and writes about things I may feel somewhat reluctant or uncomfortable in dealing with in my poems. Since meeting him, we have shared in writing some 800 of our "Songs of Ephram Pratt." Although I have been writing seriously since the late 1950s, the past several years, Ephram seems have monopolized the bulk of my writing time. Ephram and I deal with subjects about which neither of us knows much of anything, as well as subjects on which one or both of us know a lot. We love to play with words and at times we love big long words that we just love to loll around on our tongues. We love to read them aloud, although I do most of the reading and Ephram just listens. There are often times we write poems we don't know anything about, much less what they mean or understand them. Dali says, "The fact I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless." Ephram and I strongly agree with Dali, that just because we do not understand what our poems mean, it doesn't mean they are meaningless. We believe in stream of consciousness, Kerouac's spontaneous prose and the dream world of Andre Breton's automatic writing.