Grindr, West Hollywood-Based Gay Dating App, Hires Poet In Residence

WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA — Grindr, the gay dating app based in West Hollywood, has hired British writer Max Wallis as its poet in residence.

Starting next week, Wallis will pen a video poem, which will be directed by documentarian Ashley Joiner, that will be featured on the app, he announced in a column published Sunday in The Guardian.

Wallis said he is continuing a tradition of noted poets such as Lord Byron and Catullus of writing poems to promote others.

"The poems play on the essential themes of the app — relationships, our increasingly unsympathetic world and quite a lot of sex (topics that have been the subject of my last two books — 'Modern Love' and 'Everything Everything')," he wrote.

The videos will thread with each other to tell a larger story of what it is to be gay in this day and age, he said.

The first poem, "Remnants," was inspired in part by Emily Dickinson, Wallis said. The poem is about "what you leave behind psychologically and physically after sex; your interpretation of what happened, and the way you cleave to the remnants of it — the cigarette butts, the messed-up sheets."

He said, in poetry, there is no subject too taboo for it. " All of life is its subject," Wallis wrote. "Nothing should be out of bounds"

Photo courtesy of Grindr