Reporter Volume 25, No.14 January 14, 1994

By MARK WALLACE
Reporter Staff

It's important to remember that the past is always with us, William
Sylvester says.
	A professor emeritus in the UB Department of English, where he
worked from 1965-1988, Sylvester has been an active poet, fiction
writer and scholar both at UB and in the city of Buffalo, where he is
a familiar figure in the arts community. He has seen many changes over
a long and fruitful career, and he says the questions raised by those
changes are never simple ones.
	"I gave a talk a few years ago about changes I had seen in
university English departments," he says. "When I was done, someone in
the audience said that what I was talking about was just the class of
'47, that all that was 'over now.' But it's my feeling that, in a
sense, World War II did not stop, and the Depression was never solved.
In the years since, the United States has never had an affluent
society that was not based on its war industry."
	Sylvester was born in Washington D.C. in 1918, in the final
year of yet another war. He grew up in Germantown, Maryland during the
Depression. 	"People who have lived through the Depression were all
given a terrible sense of the reality of human selfishness," he says.
	The "real turning point" that brought him to an interest in
literature, Sylvester says, was a trip, as an adolescent, to an
exposition in San Diego. "The whole thing was schlock beyond belief,"
he says. "They were putting on about 20 minutes of a number of
Shakespeare's plays in a pseudo-Elizabethan theater. I saw every
single one, but remember the segment from Julius Caesar best. It ended
with Antony's line, 'Cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of war.' That's
very important, because we were always afraid of war, and we knew it
was coming.
	"In early September 1939, I was at sea when England declared
war. The boat was packed. There was a singer on board, Ruth Etting,
who was famous in her day, and a woman giving fundamentalist sermons
who promised to recite a poem called 'Little Orphan Annie' after her
sermons if people would sit through them. We heard that a ship had
been sunk, and that a little girl by the name of Erica Huebscher had
been saved in a lifeboat. That little girl is here in Buffalo, now, as
Erica Federman, wife of UB English professor Raymond Federman.
	"Before World War II, Shakespeare had enormous relevance and
immediacy for so many people. His writing is concerned with violence,
and with moral ambiguities. It's my sense that a lot of this concern
became lost in the 1950s. 
	"Here in the United States we never faced our own guilt about
the war," Sylvester says. "We discovered, instead, the pleasure of
being self-righteous, although to say it like that might overstate the
case."
	Sylvester gives as an example of U.S. guilt its incarceration
of Japanese Americans during the war. "Such things always leave me
with a question," Sylvester says. "How is it possible to be that
racist, and not even know it?
	"Part of the problem is that you can't talk about these
things. How do you avoid the automatic self-righteousness of saying
'I'm not like that', which is an attitude that doesn't help us solve
our problems?"
	Sylvester was brought to the UB English Department by Albert
Cook, then chair of the department, a poet and scholar who was also
instrumental in bringing such well-known American poets as Charles
Olson, Robert Creeley, John Logan, Irving Feldman, Jack Clark, and Mac
Hammond to UB in the 1960s, thus beginning the reputation that UB and
the city of Buffalo continue to have as one of the primary centers for
poetry in the United States. 
	Many wonderful things happened in the 1960s, Sylvester says,
but problems grew out of that era as well. "In the '60s, people in
universities began to understand all the ways that our society was
still at war," he says. "We lost the sense of our authority, and I
don't think we've ever faced the consequences of that."
	Although he retired from UB five years ago, Sylvester remains
an active member of Buffalo's arts community. In December he gave a
reading at the Burchfield Center of a work called "War and Lechery:
The Poem," which is related, he says, to the doctoral dissertation he
wrote many years ago at the University of Minnesota, called "War and
Lechery in Elizabethan Theatre." Although he refers to much of his
writing as "stand-up comic poetry," he's worried, he laughs, that the
dissertation might be funnier than the poem.
	"Unlike stand-up comedy, however, the flow of the poem is
heavily directed by the sound of the words, and how they fit,"
Sylvester says. "There's something of an affinity in it to what the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets are doing," he adds, referring to a movement in
contemporary poetry with which Charles Bernstein, another UB poet, has
often been associated.
	Sylvester has also begun publishing a new series of what he
calls "foldover broadsides," short booklets of poetry by younger poets
in and around the Buffalo community. The series gives him a chance, he
says, to keep up with what younger writers are doing.
	"There have been sharp breaks in my life, and in the lives of
many people of  my generation," Sylvester says. "We will never return
to some older standards, like the way our society treats
women--although how the details of such things will work out is
another matter.
	"One thing that seems to be changing is the rate of change.
And these days I see a neo-conservatism out there that's going to
leave me behind. You can only go through so many revolutions in one
lifetime. But still I have to ask, is the past over? Is the
Depression, is World War II really over?
	"Nonetheless, what we have to face now may be far more
important than anything in the past. This is the threat, and the
challenge."