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By Dinty W. Moore

The poet William Carlos Williams once said “No ideas but in things,” a quote that has lingered famously because poets have such pith and surety.

Is it true? No, there are ideas in philosophy textbooks too, but Williams was talking about literature, about writing that grips and holds, about deliberate concision—the whittling down of language that makes a poem a poem.

To demonstrate my own pith and surety, let me take the bold liberty of flipping the Williams quote an...