Daily Inspiration Quote by James Broughton

Broughton collapses the polite distance between art and the body, insisting that poetry is not a parlor craft but a charge that runs through the nervous system. The line works because it refuses the usual hierarchy: “spiritual practice” is typically framed as disciplined, clean, privately elevated, while “sexual ecstasy” is treated as messy, suspect, or at best recreational. By making them equals, he exposes how culture launders transcendence by stripping it of sensation. For Broughton, sensation is the doorway.

The phrasing is slyly defiant. “For me” stakes the claim as lived experience, not a manifesto, which makes the provocation harder to dismiss. He doesn’t say poetry is like sex; he says it’s as much a practice as ecstasy is. Ecstasy becomes work: not just a climax but a ritual of attention, surrender, risk. Poetry, in turn, becomes an event, not an artifact - something you do with breath, shame, courage, timing.

Context matters: Broughton emerged from avant-garde film and countercultural circles where the body was a political battleground and queerness was both stigmatized and creatively generative. His era trained artists to code desire; he does the opposite, taking desire as sacred data. The subtext is an ethics of permission: the poem is a site where the self can be fully felt, not merely described. In that sense, his “spiritual” isn’t churchly - it’s embodied, ecstatic, and unapologetically alive.