From the mailbag: "what matters most is how well you walk through the fire" (1 Viewer)

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?
 
But The Continual Condition poem is in The Continual Condition book. Or something. If they called the book The Continual Condition but left the poem out, you'd be on to something.
 
It is probably unfair to use examples of "Best of" books like Pleasures of the Damned (Mag appearance in 1962, book appearance in 1996, title in 2007.)
 
No, I think that's exactly what I was talking about.

Anyway, it just occurred to me that I responded to that guy's email but just sent him a link to this thread, which starts out with, "I get a lot of stupid email"...

So, guy, if you're watching, I wasn't talking about you, of course.

I never am.
 
It might be a cool list to compile a list of all Bukowski book titles and what poem (or book) that they first appeared. Of the 160+ "A" items, probably more than half are single poem items, so those would not need to be listed.
 
[...] 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.
most interesting is not that they took it from an earlier poem, but that it's not even the title of a poem. It's just the final line of a (b.t.w. very very immortal) poem.
 

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