“Trying to tell it all to you”: creating queer spaces through poetic organising

Purpose In this paper, I examine what “queer spaces” might constitute, and their value to queer people and to organisations. I propose that “queer spaces” might be based on the concept of “poetic organizing”, and the poetic commitment of “trying to tell it all to you”. Design/methodology/approach The paper is theoretical, autoethnographical and poetical. Findings Poetic organising is not the assertion of one’s own experience but the attempt to share it with another in ways that the other can make sense of, and connect in some way to their own experience. It invites us to both disrupt and to be disrupted and, in the mutuality of such co-disrupting, to find ways to better live with the other, and to accommodate one another. I outline the grounds and key principles of poetic organising, and how it queers how we normatively organise, including how we organise difference. Originality/value The paper extends previous incorporations of poetry into MOS by moving from looking at organisations through a complementary poetic lens (how can poetry make us look/see differently?), to the more radical practice of organising poetically (how can poetry make us do and be differently?). This also has implications for queer theory and practice as queer people or Allies in allowing our queerness itself to be queered, and recognising how what we seek to queer for our own “liveable lives” has implications for those lives of others.