Let Be, Let Be

Over the last three decades, John Kinsella has published more than 50 books across multiple genres and received numerous honors, including the Australian Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry. His byline appears regularly in leading publications around the world, among them The New Yorker and the London Review of Books.

His latest volume finds him in the role of editor rather than writer. The Uncollected Animals: Poems for Our Nonhuman Kin (Turtle Point Press, 2025) gathers work from across the centuries, foregrounding animals as beings in their own right rather than literary ornamentation or accessories. By bringing these poems together, Kinsella highlights how creative expression can open up new ways of thinking about our entanglements with the more-than-human world.

One poem that stayed with me long after I closed the anthology is Ruth Fainlight’s “City Fox,” from her 1998 collection Sugar-Paper Blue. As the clatter and clamor of a party the speaker has just left recede, a fox emerges to forage on a nighttime street: “I admire how much she seems at home, / her confident pose as she trots toward / a black plastic garbage bag, and / notice that she or another fox / has been there already.”

Here, an urban fox rifling through garbage becomes something beautiful and haunting—a sharp contrast to the annoyance humans often feel when confronted with the remnants of a plundered trash bag in the morning light.

As this example demonstrates, Kinsella’s collection is not about the absence of humans but, rather, an invitation to consider the world from the vantage point of nonhuman animals. While we may never know what it’s like to be a fox (or a bat, or a badger, or a spider), the poems in this volume ask us to inhabit perspectives that are too often ignored in our multispecies world. This is, by definition, an imperfect task—we cannot escape our own subject position—yet the worlds these poets conjure crack open the possibility of shifting our frame, even if only briefly. Poetry, and art more broadly, can help us see differently and experience moments of humility and awe as we attend to the nonhuman beings with whom we share our world. These poems nudge us toward what might otherwise remain culturally invisible, and they invite empathy for lives we often overlook. The implications of that are radical.

At the time of the interview, Kinsella was in Australia and I was in Canada. We spoke via webcam, and while technology made our conversation easy—the hardest part was juggling time zones—I found myself wishing I could have walked alongside him as we talked, moving through the landscapes he so clearly loves and whose nonhuman inhabitants have shaped so much of his work.

Can you start by describing the book and your goals with the project?

In the early 2000s, I was living in Ohio and teaching at Kenyon College. I tried to get an animal anthology together then, but I didn't have a publisher. One of the driving forces was the contrast between the birds of central Ohio—around Gambier and Mount Vernon, where I was living—and those where I come from, which is rural Western Australia. As you'd expect, they’re startlingly different, but the language of animals is universal. So, I got quite fascinated by how you can put together a kind of animal rights anthology that respects differences among animals, respects their agencies, but also creates a human language of talking about them as a whole—much like you talk about people, in fact.

A few years ago, in the early stages of the pandemic, I thought a global language of talking about and for animals was necessary. We were in a time that was very human-centric, anthropocentric, and we were concerned about what was happening to people. At the same time, in Western Australia, I was observing a lot of things like land-clearing and opening up new mines. This stuff was taking place at a really rapid pace. Under the cover of a horrendous situation in the pandemic, nature was being literally attacked on a vast scale, because all sorts of measures were put in place to allow certain projects to go ahead to keep up economic viability. And it really upset me. Animals were being pushed aside. So, I started the anthology again. I wrote to publishers, and Turtle Point responded almost immediately. It wasn't a drawn-out process of trying to convince them. They said, this is a project we really want to do.

I've been a vegan for 40 years and an animal rights activist for just as long. The first poem I ever published in a vegetarian/vegan magazine was about the Australian army machine-gunning emus along the South Australian-Western Australian border, which happened in the 1940s and ’50s. I remember how upset and outraged I was. I wrote a poem, and a local vegetarian society published it. So you could say that that point was really the beginning of it.

What was the process of selecting poems for this book? You commissioned 60 poets and dealt with a whole bunch of historical material. What was the criteria as you pulled it all together?

First of all, I wish it was 10,000 pages long. But the realities of publishing mean that that can't be the case. People have been singing about, writing about, talking about, identifying with, and empathizing with animals in all cultures of the world since the beginning. I'd have liked to have included poetry from as many languages and as many cultures as I could. But, again, the reality of things meant that limitations immediately applied. So although there are translations in the book, it's in English—and that's already a limitation. As someone hyper-conscious of the colonial implications behind all things, there's a process of scrutiny and analysis of myself as an editor that had to be undertaken to think about how I would collate material.

Then there's the issue of access. I always work not to be appropriative, and I always consult, especially if there are indigenous sources involved. I have moved very carefully. It didn't limit me because I don't have the rights to certain things, but I had to go where I'm able to go ethically.

Another limitation is permissions because you're dealing sometimes with someone like Marianne Moore, you're dealing with an estate that is used to being well-provided for because the poems are in high demand. We've got three of them in there, and these things are cost-prohibitive. Turtle Point Press is not a massive international company. It's a small, highly committed literary publisher that has been very generous, and they provided a good budget for permissions. But all 60 commissioned writers are doing this for nothing. They're doing it for copies of the book.

There were things I couldn't get permission for because publishers just didn't reply or estates didn't allow it, or we couldn't afford it. That happened on many occasions. Things that I had chosen couldn't be included because they were just too expensive, which really troubles me. I'm a vegan anarchist pacifist, for God's sake. I don't believe in monetary capital and so on. I just don't. I used to live on the commune! It's all a mystery to me at times because I think we should share what we have.

I've tried to create something that's a bunch of conversations about how humans interact with and view and think about animals—coexist with animals. That doesn't mean the poems don't have harm or exploitation in them. It would be make-believe not to address those issues. I really wanted the diverse thing.

I'm glad you mentioned the commissioned pieces, because I was going to ask you about that process and whether the poets were on board.

Oh, they were great. And all enthusiastic and engaged. I've been in the so-called poetry world for many decades, so I know a lot of people, but I went to them on the basis of work that I knew. There are millions of poets whose work I may not be so familiar with who might feel neglected. Well, it's not personal. It was literally a matter of how one can make contact with people, and people also had to trust me and know me, if not personally—and many of them don't—then they have to know of me and know what I do and feel sure over the decades that I'm consistent in my position.

Is there a poem in the anthology that stands out in terms of how it haunts you or that you constantly return to because it drives your activism?

The poems that haunt me most aren't the ones that are clear cases of advocacy, which I'd expect. They're the ones where something surprises. A poem I constantly think of is Sylvia Plath's “Pheasants,” where she's talking about Ted Hughes, who, although a poet I greatly admire, is not in the book. While he wrote many animal poems, they're tooth-and-claw, blood-hunter kinds of relationships, or fishing relationships. And that's not what this book's about. In the Plath poem, she has this amazing statement. She says, “Do not kill it. It startles me.” And in the end, the last lines: “let be, let be”—just let the animal be. I concur with that. We can be amazed or overwhelmed by animals. We can just see them there. You don't have to intervene. You don't have to interfere. You can just be startled and amazed.

In your introduction, you write something along the lines of: sometimes not knowing is the most respectful choice. And that was in terms of scientific inquiry. Can you expand more on that context of science and knowing and not knowing?

I have very particular views on science because it's what I originally came out of. When I went to university, it was to do arts, but it was a 50-50 thing. I was thinking of doing chemistry, and I ended up doing arts, but I worked in a laboratory—part-time, casual— from the age of 15 to 19. A lot of my politics formed there, including my incredible loathing of the mining industries and what they've done to the country, what they've done to land and animals and so on. I was doing research into chemiluminescence and other things. I was really quite seriously into it. So, my views aren’t just skepticism that comes out of philosophy. It's a skepticism that comes out of participation in a certain kind of material science. As worthy as scientific investigation may be, it often comes at the expense of animals.

I might come out of science, and I read a lot of it and I participate in it intellectually still, but unless, like everything else in life, it is critiqued and scrutinized and held ethically accountable, it can be very tragic. So, I think sometimes: leave the animals be, you don't have to open them up to look inside them, and you don't have to make us the center of everything they do.

In many indigenous cultures in the world, the relationship with animals is direct, and I'm not ever going to judge that. That's not mine to comment on. I just don't go into those spaces, and not because I'm wary or “scared,” but because I'm respectful of them, and I do think there are kinships and totemic relationships that are beyond my understanding. But within the broader internationalist discourse—I don't just mean Western discourse, I mean internationalist discourse—around animals and around animal rights, I think I can make a reasonable contribution to the conversation.

There’s a line in the introduction that I highlighted because I love it so much: "How we gain knowledge of the thinking of animals is part of the undertaking of the poet." It’s such a beautiful line. And I love this idea of gaining knowledge through poetry.

As a really small kid I actually believed I conversed with animals. And I believed they spoke to me. There’s a poem in my next book about this duck that we rescued as children. We called her Donna. And she used to go back and forth to the swamp, which was about two miles away. She’d waddle to the swamp and then come back. And I sat for dozens and dozens of hours, singing and talking to this duck who would make sounds back to me. It was part of the formative experience of becoming a poet, because I started to visualize the quacking sounds as words and pictures. No one could tell me I wasn't having a conversation with this duck.

There's this deep communication happening subtextually, and maybe sublingually as well. One of the wonderful things about a great piece of animal-affirming art is that you can feel through the image a kinship of the painter—or the artist in any form, sculptor or whatever it might be—you can feel that empathy. Now, you might not be able to explain it. You know, if it's a still life with a bird's neck broken and hanging on its side, that also speaks something horrific.

This is not magical thinking. It sounds a bit woo-woo, but it's not. I believe that we spend a lot of our lives trying to find ways to communicate with animals, and a lot of art and a lot of music and a lot of poetry and fiction about animals is an attempt to bridge what we've just said.

We're actually closer through creativity than we think. Animals are incredibly creative. An insect is creative. There is a potential for kinship there at any given time. And that doesn't have to be intrusive kinship, where you're trying to impose your will on the animal—just being in the presence of other life on the planet.

How do you hope readers respond to the book?

Mostly, I hope that it helps them. I hope it assists in some way in finding a language of kinship. That's the most important thing. Also, I just like the idea of supporting animal rights. And look, these poets are all magnificent. They really are.

Is there anything else you want to leave us with?

We're interconnected. This is not about me. It is about something very separate from me, but also involving me as well. I'd like to think it will help people bring some modes of thinking about how we're living in the world, and not only regarding the very specific nature of animals, but how we're treating the biosphere. Because if we keep wrecking the biosphere, there will be no humans, and there will be no other non-human animals either. It's about all of us. The reader, the person who picks up the book, they matter every bit as much, and their experience matters every bit as much. I just don't believe there are any hierarchies in this. See, I'm not an animal kingdom person. I don't believe in this pyramidic structure. I believe in this kind of osmotic, interactive, multidimensional, interactive kind of space. We can think about that conceptually when it comes to computers and so on. We seem not to be able to so easily realize that of living things. People talk of living systems, but living systems in some ways need the system part removed and just be living.