Douglas Messerli
| Douglas Messerli | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 30, 1947 Waterloo, Iowa, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer, professor, publisher |
| Years active | 1976–present |
| Known for | founding Green Integer and Sun & Moon press |
| Title | Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France) |
Douglas Messerli (born May 30, 1947) is an American writer, professor, and publisher based in Los Angeles, California. In 1976, he started Sun & Moon, a magazine of art and literature, which became Sun & Moon press, and later Green Integer press. He has taught at Temple University in Philadelphia, and Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.
Messerli grew up in a very ordinary American home. His father, a former coach, was the superintendent of the public schools, and his mother, a former schoolteacher, was a home-bound housewife. Messerli’s brother later became a football coach and teacher, and his sister works for the Iowa State Department of Education. Within this seemingly normal home life, Messerli developed at a young age a passion for theater, reading American and European figures such as Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, and Jean Genet. At sixteen he traveled to Norway for one year, attending school there. Upon his return to the USA, he attended the University of Wisconsin, dropping out after this junior year to live for a period in New York City, during which time he studied dance at the Joffrey Ballet Company and worked as Assistant to Protocol at Columbia University. In 1969 he returned to Wisconsin, where he met his lifelong companion, Howard Fox, at the first gay liberation meeting on campus. Together they moved to Washington, D.C. in 1970. For a while, Messerli worked as a librarian at American University, but ultimately returned to finish his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Maryland.
Messerli concentrated on fiction until he met critic and teacher Marjorie Perloff, whose influence shifted his interests to poetry. In 1975 he and Fox began a journal of literature and art, Sun & Moon, which focused on contemporary and experimental writing and art. In the late 1970s he began to publish books under that name by major literary figures such as David Antin, Charles Bernstein, Paul Auster, Steve Katz, Russell Banks, and Djuna Barnes. He also began writing poetry himself, and in 1979 published Dinner on the Lawn (revised in 1982). Some Distance and River to Rivet: A Manifesto followed, making up a trilogy of books of and about poetry and poetics. In the early 1980s Messerli became a professor of literature at Temple University in Philadelphia. Commuting between Washington and Philadelphia, he continued to write, working on a new book of poetry, Maxims from My Mother’s Milk/Hymns to Him, and a series of three books of combined poetry/fiction/performance collectively titled The Structure of Destruction, the last volume of which, Letters from Hanusse, was published under the pseudonym of Joshua Haigh.
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