By Yeow Kai Chai

On his website, Christopher Merrill quoted a line from E.M. Forster's epigraph to Howards End (1910): "Only connect."

It's an apt mantra for the American who wears mulitple hats: He is poet, non-fiction writer, editor, translater and, last but not least, the director of the prestigious International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa.

He commandeered an intiative in 2008 which led to Iowa City to be selected by Unesco as the world's third City of Literature, as part of the Creative Cities Network. Three years later, he was appointed to the US National Commission for UNESCO.

He is the author of six poetry collections, including Watch Fire (1995), for which he received the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. Last year, he had a double-bill: Boat, which comprises meditations and fantasias, ghazals and lyric sequences; and Necessities, a book of prose verse influenced by his reading of writers such as Kafka and Calvino. In 2011, he publised a travelogue, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, the first part of which was set in Malaysia.

His latest project is Silk Routes: Heritage, Trade, Practice, a three-year project of the IWP. It is aimed to creare virtual networks of writers working in their own traditions but linked by a common engagement with the craft and art of writing. It is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter of 2014.

He took time off from his busy schedule to answer the Proust Questionnaire during late summer before autumn set in.

1. What are you reading right now?
Yannis Ritsos' Diaries of Exile; Marina Tsvetaeva's Moscow in the Plage Year; John Berryman's The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems; Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night; John Vailant's The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival; Jay Winik's The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World 1788-1800; and a variety of foreign policy journals and blogs.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play, or poem, who would you be, and why?
There are moments in Anna Karenina, notably when Levin is working in his fields, or lifting weights, or trying to make sense of something he has heard, that I recognise him as a kindred spirit, as in this passage late in the novel:

"Levin strode along the highroad, absorbed not so much in his thoughts (he could not yet disentangle them) as in his spiritual condition, unlike anything he had experienced before.

The words uttered by the peasant had acted on his soul like an electric shock, suddenly transforming and combining into a single whole the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts that incessantly occupied his mind. These thoughts had unconsciously been in his mind even when he was talking about the land.

He was aware of something new in his soul, and joyfully tested this new thing, not yet knowing what it was."

His endlessly questing sensibility strikes a deep chord in me.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I write quickly. The fact is that I cast and recast sentences so often that it often seems as if I am making no progress at all. But pages accumulate over the years.

4. Name one living author and one dead author you identify with most, and tell us why.
St. John Perse and W. S. Merwin, whose works and lives are constant sources of inspiration to me.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
No.

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
Quickness, persistence, and the ability to draw connections between one thing and another, not to mention the most important factor of all: a good ear.

7. What is one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
Careerism. Great poets and writers are servants of the language, not of themselves.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
Brewster Ghiselin: "All the field, savoured in the one wild dewberry."

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
…was a teaching tennis professional for three summers when I was a teenager.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
I love suspense—Francois Truffaut's book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock is an indispensable book—and so I am particularly drawn to noir and espionage films, most recently A Most Wanted Man, which features the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman at his seediest—and most brilliant.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Every word has the potential to be interesting or overused. It is the writer's obligation to savour the former and save the latter.

12. Write a rhyming couplet that includes the following three items: mast, eschatologist, stone.
The eschatologist fell from the mast
Into the sea, stone-like, crying, Avast!

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
A Cross pen.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
Mornings and late at night. But poems can begin at any hour, and so I try to keep myself open to what the language, the muse, or God might have to say; otherwise the sources of inspiration may well dry up.

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and A. J. Liebling. I want to spend my last night laughing.

16. As the director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, you have witnessed many writers up close and personal. What are your best memories?
Conversations, here and abroad, in which the mystery of existence reveals itself.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
I plan to be cremated, with my ashes spread at sea.

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