The gay social networking app Grindr has appointed its first poet in residence. Max Wallis, who used to blog his poems regularly on Write Out Loud, will be making a video poem each month.

Writing in the Guardian, Max, said: “Poetry and sex have a long and venerable history, one often being used in the service of setting up the other. Catullus kicked things off, and Lord Byron, Sharon Olds and Carol Ann Duffy, among others, have run with the ball since. The work of those poets is perhaps best thought of as the context for what I am doing now.”

The video poems, he said, “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). Each video threads into the next, telling a larger story about what is to be gay now.”

He went on: “The first poem, Remnants, partly inspired by Emily Dickinson, 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.”