Daily Inspiration Quote by James Broughton

“Set out flags” is the giveaway: Broughton isn’t describing writing as decoration or confession, but as signaling. A flag marks territory, declares a presence, and guides people through fog. It’s public, visible, even a little theatrical. Coming from a director-poet who spent decades on the margins of mainstream American culture, the phrase carries a sly insistence: if the official map won’t acknowledge your landscape - erotic, spiritual, playful, queer - you plant your own markers and dare others to follow.

“Issue wake-up calls” pushes the mission from navigation to interruption. A wake-up call isn’t a polite invitation to reflect; it’s a jolt delivered when you’d rather keep sleeping. The subtext is impatience with cultural complacency, with the genteel idea that art should soothe or flatter. Broughton’s work often fused exuberance with moral urgency, using humor, ritual, and body-forward imagery to puncture prudishness and deadened routines. The line frames writing as an action taken against anesthesia.

Context matters: Broughton came of age alongside modernism’s suspicion of comfort, then lived through mid-century conformity, Cold War moral policing, and the later countercultural explosion. His sensibility wasn’t just “rebel”; it was deliberately celebratory, treating joy as a serious provocation. The rhetoric is simple and practical - aim, flags, calls - because he’s talking about craft as civic behavior. Art, for him, is a field kit: you mark what you’ve found, then you shake someone awake so they’ll actually see it.