In an interview with Ray González (The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 22, #2), Charles Simic said: "Short poems are not written but found in longer poems. I've written many longer poems that were going nowhere until I realized that there was another, much smaller poem in them and that it said all that needs to be said. I believe that in poetry, less is more. I'm astonished that so much can be said in so few words."

'Wicche Jarre' began with an idea for a longer poem. I whittled it down to five lines. Anything else seemed superfluous. There's magic in brevity.