And yet Antoine is famous for book-length works, not poetry, and certainly not minimalist poetry.
Don't take the lesson too literally. You can, in fact, take too much away. How much you need to put in depends on your artistic goals and, of course, on your audience.
Well, there's necessary complexity and unnecessary complexity. Perhaps he felt that in order to communicate the ideas and story in his book, he had to write a book length work.
My point is that with programming language abstractions, you can in fact remove things without hurting the theoretical power of the language, but actually harming the practical power of the language.
You do have to leave things in that you could take away.
