The Blast Furnace Went Out in 2015, but What Happened to the Town? Kipling and Redcar
From Alden Carrow's Poetry Podcast · 20:16
Show by Alden Carrow
A blast furnace that ran day and night for years. A poem in which the machines talk as if they made themselves. And a seaside town that carried on. In Episode 47, we go to Redcar, where the River Tees meets the North Sea, eleven years after the fire in the furnace went out, and ask how a poem can honour what a town made without turning it into a museum piece. Our guest poem is Rudyard Kipling’s The Secret of the Machines, written in 1911, in which the machines speak for themselves, proud and cold. Then I read my own poem, Redcar, from North Yorkshire In Verse — Moor To Shore In Poetry, with the real story of the place behind it, including the oldest surviving lifeboat in the world. Stay to the end and you’ll leave knowing how Kipling’s poem works, plus three habits for writing a place after its industry has gone: name the work, find the one person behind the number, and let the present be as real as the past. Pour something warm. Stay awhile. There is poetry to be found in the everyday. New to the podcast? Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen — free, and it arrives every Wednesday morning. ALMBCJK2J8AGDV8Z
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