Daily Inspiration Quote by James Broughton

A sly little grenade lobbed at the gatekeepers of taste, Broughton’s line draws a bright, almost teasing border between poetry as credential and poetry as temperament. “Rarest” does a lot of work: it suggests not just scarcity but a kind of endangered species, the real poet as an ecological oddity in a culture that prefers things measurable, teachable, and market-ready. “Born poets” isn’t a mystical Hallmark claim so much as a provocation. He’s insisting that the deepest poetic impulse arrives pre-institution: a way of noticing, risking, and rearranging reality that doesn’t wait for permission.

Calling them “oddballs” is the tell. It’s affectionate, but also defiant. The poet Broughton values is socially misfit by design: someone willing to look ridiculous, to follow obsession, to violate the polite rules of coherence. That word also quietly democratizes genius. Oddballs can come from anywhere; professors, by contrast, belong to systems. “Not the professors” isn’t anti-intellectualism so much as a jab at professionalization: the workshop-industrial complex, the tenure track of taste, the idea that art gets validated by committees.

Context matters: Broughton was a filmmaker and poet shaped by mid-century counterculture and queer artistic circles, where the body, performance, and play were central. He’s defending a poetics of lived experience and unruly delight against the flattening force of academic correctness. The subtext is a warning: when poetry becomes a career, it risks becoming a genre of safety.