Brad Vogel

My body’s overheated, & my heart is full. 🩵 Our 7th annual Harborwide Reading for NYC Poets Afloat @poetsafloat surprised me, moved me, and delighted me yet again. And the people; the boats are just the bridges to the wonderful people. 😌 Thanks to @seaportmuseum for hosting today, all our shipkeepers for hosting along the way, and all the poets who gave the waves play.

Over 50 paintings, an artist’s life work, could’ve gone to the dumpster - but we’re not letting that happen - see you Monday. #art #artsale #gowanus #brooklyn #grotesqueriesandfriends

Keep Gowanus bridges moveable! 🌉 Large vessels need to access the upper reaches of the Canal to maintain the superfund cleanup remedy. Bridges must be capable of opening for ecological & community health in our polluted neighborhood. With a planning meeting next week about waterfront open space & parkland from Bond St to the 9th Street Bridge - a major swath of the mid-Canal - it’s important to stress this point because a pedestrian bridge has been discussed with some seriousness. 🗓️ Meeting: Tuesday, May 19, 2026 - 6 pm - In person at the plaza at the west end 9th Street Bridge. Open to the public. ☝️Other things @nycparks should consider: - Retain the ten pilings just north of Huntington along the cutoff wall so Blue Highways vessels can move Parks materials; make this a boat-cargo bike hub ⚓️ - Ensure there are multiple boat launches and at least one public boat house 🛶 - Make this part of the waterfront distinctive; we don’t want it to look the same as all the other esplanades and we don’t want it to look like the High Line 💡 - Ensure coal tar and other chemical pollutants have been removed from the site 🛢️ - Transport materials for building out any waterfront park and open space via sustainable means from the region - use the services of @schooner_apollonia for example ⛵️ - Retain the docking site just past the northeast border of Public Place at the water’s edge 🚤 #gowanus #bluehighways #gowanuscanal #bridges #waterfrontaccess

One of the unexpected pleasures of yesterday’s back-to-back @92ndstreety narrative nonfiction marathon was meeting people I mostly know through screens and messages. And other narrative nonfiction fans I never met before. My tribe. At the Jon Krakauer event, I got to talk with my newest social media pal, Kate Weil. She went to Friends Seminary about a decade before I did, (I left in 8th grade) and we first connected while I was researching my New York Times piece on John Lennon’s visit to the school. When I was in third grade, Kate was actually one of the older students in the room that day. Such a strange New York overlap. Really lovely to talk in person rather than via email or Insta or Facebook comments. 🙂 Then upstairs at the Joseph Mitchell event, I realized I was sitting right in front of @bowerybird and his The Center for Fiction @center4fiction Joseph Mitchell class, apparently all there on a field trip. Completely my crowd. I wasn’t aware there was a Joseph Mitchell class, squee, and I suggested they all take @nathankensinger Nathan Kensinger’s incredible Staten Island Lemon Creek walking tour through @nych2o . Essential Mitchell energy. The time I went, I ended up blissfully wet up to my knees. Here’s Brad’s class. I hope he teaches it again. /group-workshop/joseph-mitchells-up-in-the-old-hotel-with-brad-vogel/ PS Nora Mitchell, Joseph’s daughter, was in the room again - I went to a Mitchell event years ago and sat next to her! cc @alexvadukul

Bring your mom or bring a friend (🎟️ ➡️🔗) @poetsafloat #7thannual #poetry #manhattan #nyc #nycpoetsafloat

Tuesday Morning Paddles with @gowanusdredgers have returned for the 2026 season! 🛶 🌅 So many new scenes out on Gowanus Bay - vessels Pilot and Victory Chimes are now anchored in Henry Street Basin, we paddled around the Peter J. Sharp floating boathouse (formerly of the Harlem River) in Erie Basin, the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal is progressing with big cranes, the green wooden canoe debuted, and we glimpsed the blue highways ferry Phyllis Anne now docked near the foot of 29th street. Join the Dredgers as a Steward member and come out on Tuesday mornings 7-8 am. #gowanusbay #gowanusdredgers #tuesdaymorningpaddle

🪗 Some of you asked about the accordion. It’s my great grandpa Walter’s, from his time in a polka band called the Triangle Band back in the 1940s/50s. I never met him, as he died before I was born (he served aboard the U.S.S. Arizona in the 1920s). But I feel I’ve gotten to know him a bit through his diatonic button accordion. 🎶 He must have been a low key brilliant guy, as this thing takes a certain kind of mind to play in full - I taught myself to make primitive sounds by futzing around like a shepherd in the ruins of Rome during some downtime in 2007. That led to busking over the years in Madison (once w a trio!), New Orleans (in Pirate’s Alley), and even Washington Square Park (pigeons!). I find I play and improvise just well enough in my crude way to make small children dance spontaneously. :] The instrument has never been repaired or serviced since he died in the late 1970s. Except for the thumb strap, which I had a cobbler re-constitute in rather brute form with some heavy leather along the way. I love the purple shimmer. 👍 🚢 I’m rusty as hell. But it was fun to take it for a spin on the @gowanusdredgers Bunker Launch Site dock — as a tug spun a garbage scow around in the Gowanus Canal behind me. The Dredgers on-water paddling season, by the way, opens today, May 1 - a day for protest, speaking out, and countering the pernicious things afoot across the land, across the world. Thanks to @jonbowermaster for the prompt!

🪶🪗 I read my poetry on the water this morning for the Green Radio Hour with @jonbowermaster - wrapping a staggering National Poetry Month 2026 chock full of poetry activity beyond my ability to recapitulate fully. 😌😵‍💫 Here’s what I can recall (not in order)! Poetry Marathon co-lead @brooklynmuseum Gowanustasia VII curation & reading @principlesbk Inaugural Night Class teaching @cafemartinbk Inaugural Balcony Reading @waltwhitmaninitiative & @fultonstallmarket Poetry for Hard Times curation & reading @bklynlibrary Coordinating & sending poets out for @poetsafloat Witnessing @singaporeunbound & @evergreenreview reading in Queens Attending first @dgnreading Publication in Second Coming with @michaelbroder @thegowanussalon “Divine Comedy” w @lesleybraver Le @kylecarrerolopez @doty1494 | @poets_house 40th The @rebzuki pear poem, reading @brooklynhistory Recitation on-water for Green Radio @radiokingstonny So many solid memories with good people, great poets, heart-stilling poems. Poetry is so hard to bottle properly, but it’s enthrallingly all-encompassing when you somehow manage to catch it, when the blue jay sits still for a half a breath & you grip it through the leaves. #poetry #nationalpoetrymonth #poets

Let’s get our Gowanus terminology - & typology - right! Just a bit about the landmark Carroll Street Bridge, a RETRACTILE bridge from 1889 - set to re-open soon after the city rebuilt the eastern abutment on the Park Slope side of the Gowanus Canal. Want to help celebrate the re-opening next month? Shoot me a DM; we’ll be meeting up soon. #carrollstreetbridge #gowanus #gowanuscanal

Just in time for Earth Day, Arbor Day, and spring bird migration, the destruction of the Rose Garden and Vale of Cashmere in Prospect Park is well underway. Prospect Park has improved in many ways in the past decade, but this not one of them. $40 million dollars, including taxpayer funds, are being spent to destroy a beloved, “world apart” corner of the park that felt blessedly overlooked and away from the hubbub just as it was. All of the mature, moody yew trees that gave the upper portion such a distinctive atmosphere have been clear cut. The Vale’s overgrown glacial kettle bowl is being slicked up for the same communities that already dominate most of the rest of the park. It’s a travesty in a designated scenic landmark - one driven by a shallow, limited view of what parks are, who they serve, and how they function in complex ways that interrelate with cities. I participated in one of the early online public input sessions, and it was clear that those who saw value in the Vale as it was…were not going to be taken seriously, that the haven for nature, birders, poets, musicians, and queer folx of color was going to be obliterated whether anyone liked it or not. Comments by Alliance leadership to the press about respecting the site’s queer significance rang hollow and ironic - the physical destruction began apace even as those comments were made. We do not need more of the sterile city. Are more bathrooms needed in the park? Sure - but decidedly not in this spot. Life thrived in these spaces in part BECAUSE they were a bit more overgrown and off the beaten path. We need feral pockets in our parks that are not overplanned and generified with the intent to disrupt and eliminate a whole host of unplanned public uses and grassroots communities. See @doll.herbalism for more on how we got here - and what’s being lost. #prospectpark #valeofcashmere #brooklyn

What poem got you through a hard time? 💭 Each poet will respond by reading one poem by another poet, a second poem they wrote themselves. 🪶 Join us tomorrow evening, 4.21.26, for the poetry we may need now more than ever, poetry for hard times. 6:30-8:00 pm at the Park Slope branch of @bklynlibrary I’ll be moderating and chiming in with my own duo. Poets include: @rebeccamzengicorey @nowheresouth @rdiskinblack #poetry #poetryreading #brooklyn

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