mjp
Founding member
As some of you know, I get a lot of stupid email. At first I thought that this was just another one of them, but it got me thinking, where does that line come from? I couldn't recall. It isn't part of a poem in the book, and those non-poem titles were usually dreamed up by Bukowski. But he was many years under the dirt when the book came out, so I wondered, as this guy did:
Wondering where the title "what matters most is how well you walk through the fire" comes from?
Oddly enough, it comes from a poem (how is your heart?) in the 1986 book, You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense. I can't think of another example of a title coming from a poem/book that was published so much earlier than the book that carries the title. Can you?