he's into Grecian urns, so am I!

Mike Spry: I guess the things I find interesting about all three books is that relationships with tradition and contemporary. You're equally comfortable discussing Twain and Maupassant as John Stamos and Beyoncé.

David McGimpsey: I don't think of those things as being unusual. The only thing that becomes unusual is people's insistence that things like John Stamos don't belong in poems. To me it's all just metaphorical matter, and I'm not really writing about John Stamos anymore than John Keats is writing about a Grecian urn. You don't say, "Oh I love John Keats because he likes Grecian urns too, this poet talks about the things that I like, he's into Grecian urns, so am I!" The world of poetry, for whatever reason, is fairly uncomfortable with the world of working class culture.

...

Spry: What about the Internet as a place, but more specifically social media as a place?

McGimpsey: I think these things have been an enormous benefit to literature. I can’t justify it in a full way. My anecdotal psychological insight into this is that Facebook and social media has made younger people generally better poets than they used to be, and the reason why is that now it becomes a thing that people just know how to do without being told how to do it: How to materialize the self. The function that poets often engage in to where your speaking self as a poet is a kind of materialization of an aspect of your personality. It’s not you, but a version of you. And good version of you. One where you’re more articulate, more on point, one where you’re more perceptive. Your Facebook is like that. It’s a materialization of who you are.

- David McGimpsey, in interview with Mike Spry over at Cosmonauts Avenue. You can read the whole thing here.