Dario Cvencek is
an immigrant poet from the Balkans and a research scientist at the University
of Washington. By day he studies how children construct identity. By night—or
by whatever hour the poem arrives—he writes about war, trauma, displacement,
and the slow, stubborn work of rebuilding a self in a new language. His words
have appeared in Rattle, Zone 3, Hobart, and numerous
other independent literary magazines and presses. His debut full-length
collection PTSD Martini was published by Carbonation Press in 2025, with
his follow-up collection Mirror Made of Words being released in 2026. He
started writing poetry as a teenager during the Bosnian War. He has not
stopped.1 - How did your first book change
your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it
feel different?
My first full-length collection, PTSD Martini, marked the point where
writing stopped being abstract and became something concrete, even necessary.
It was the first time I fully confronted war and its psychological aftermath in
a sustained way. In that sense, it changed my life because it forced me to stop
observing trauma from a distance and instead write directly through it.
My newer work, Mirror Made of Words,
feels like a continuation of that arc, but from a different psychological
space. If the first book is about confrontation, the second is about what
happens after falling apart—reflection, integration, and self-discovery. The
emotional register shifts, but the underlying question remains the same: how
does a person rebuild meaning after fragmentation? The two collections are kind
of like the two sides of the same coin.
2 - How did you come to poetry first,
as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Poetry was always of interest to me because it is short,
immediate, and in a way impulsive art form. There is an urgency to express
something in real time, without the extended scaffolding that fiction or
non-fiction often requires. That compression felt closer to how I experience
thought and emotion—less linear, more fragmentary, and more instinctive.
I was drawn to the idea that a poem
can begin as a single charged moment—an image, a line, a feeling—and still
carry enough weight to stand on its own. That immediacy is what pulled me
toward poetry in the first place.
3 - How long does it take to start any
particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it
a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or
does your work come out of copious notes?
Writing for me tends to come quickly. It usually begins as
an impulse that arrives in the form of either an opening line or the final line
of a piece. From there, I build outward around that initial core idea or
structure.
First drafts are often very close to
their final shape. I might make small adjustments afterwards—refining word
choice, adjusting spacing, or tightening rhythm—but the underlying structure
typically remains intact. I think that immediacy helps preserve a certain
rawness and emotional clarity in the work, which is important to me.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin
for you? Are you working toward a book from the beginning, or do poems
accumulate into a larger project?
Poems for me often begin as individual emotional or conceptual units—an image,
a line, or a specific internal pressure that needs to be translated into language
quickly. They rarely start as part of a planned structure. However, over time
I’ve realized that those fragments will eventually organize themselves into something larger,
even before I consciously name it as a book.
With PTSD Martini, I was more
aware of that underlying organization from the beginning. I wasn’t only writing
individual poems about war, displacement, and loss of identity—I was also
thinking about how a reader moves through those states over time. In that
sense, the collection was designed as a kind of emotional progression rather
than a journalistic archive of pieces.
Even when the material sounds
fragmented, there is still structure shaping how it is received. The book
begins in a rough emotional terrain and gradually shifts, not necessarily toward
resolution, but toward a kind of earned clarity: what emerges when lived
experience is processed over time.
5 - Are public readings part of or
counter to your creative process? Do you enjoy doing readings?
Through hosting Speak Out Seattle, I’ve come to understand public
readings on a much larger scale. What began as a simple idea for a fun night
out with a friend has, over time, grown into something closer to community
organizing and cultural work. It’s a monthly curated showcase of poetry, music,
and comedy featuring local artists across the Greater Seattle area, with a
strong focus on marginalized and underrepresented voices, and we’ve recently
been fortunate to receive funding from King County through 4Culture to support
its continued growth.
We’re now in our fourth year, and it
has become something steady and living—attendance and participation remain
strong, which speaks to the need it fills. In many ways, it functions as
cultural infrastructure: cross-pollinating various art performance spaces
across the city, showing up at other open mics, and helping new voices find
each other and a stage. Over time, it has become less a “project” and more a
community—people returning month after month, building relationships through
shared attention and shared vulnerability—which has fundamentally shaped how I
think about readings as not separate from poetry, but as one of the ways poetry
becomes something real out there in the world.
6 - Do you have theoretical concerns
behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer?
On one level, I’m interested in identity as a cognitive structure—how the self
connects to categories, memories, and experiences. On another level, I’m
interested in how personal memory becomes a collective narrative, and how that narrative
eventually becomes something like a myth.
A central tension in my work is the
balance between the deeply personal and the universally accessible. How do you
write something specific enough to be true, but open enough that someone else
can enter it? That balance between uniqueness and relatability is something I’m
constantly negotiating.
7 - What do you see the current role
of the writer being in larger culture?
I think the role of the writer is no longer singular or fixed. Writing exists
simultaneously as a private process and as a public intervention.
On one hand, it is deeply internal—a
way of organizing experience and working through emotional or psychological
complexity. On the other hand, once it enters the public sphere, it becomes
collective. It engages readers, communities, and sometimes political realities.
In that sense, writing can also
function as resistance. Not necessarily in an overt way, but by insisting on
visibility, emotional truth, and complexity in a world that often flattens
those things. I also think there is an increasingly important role for writers
as historians of the present. When lived experience is constantly relativized
and distorted through media ecosystems, misinformation, and competing political
narratives, writers are often the ones doing a kind of slow, observational
record-keeping. Not in the sense of replacing journalism, but in the sense of
bearing witness. One role of the writer is to preserve texture, detail,
and emotional truth so that what is happening is not only what is circulated,
but also what is actually experienced.
8 - Do you find working with an
outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think working with an outside editor
is essential, but not always comfortable. Writing, especially poetry, is such a
subjective process that you often become attached to the logic of how something
arrived on the page. An outside editor disrupts that intimacy in a productive
way. They see the structure rather than the emotional pathway you took to get
there.
For me, the best editorial
relationships are not about correction, but about clarity. Someone who can say:
this is what the poem is doing, and this is what it is actually communicating,
regardless of intent. That distance is valuable. It forces a kind of
recalibration between emotional truth and formal precision.
9 - What is the best piece of advice
you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
One idea that has stayed with me is
the importance of continuing to write even when you don’t fully understand what
you’re writing about yet. Meaning for me often arrives after the fact. I don’t
always begin with clarity: I begin with fragments, and understanding comes
later through revision and distance.
In a broader sense, I also return to
the idea that all storytelling is reconstruction. That means, as artists, we are
never simply reporting experience; instead, we are shaping it into something
that can be carried on by someone else. That shift in responsibility changes
how I approach the work.
10 - What kind of writing routine do
you tend to keep, or do you even have one? What does a typical day look like?
My writing routine is not highly
structured in a traditional sense. My work emerges in short, concentrated
bursts rather than long uninterrupted sessions. So instead of a single “writing
day,” it’s more like a continuous process of accumulation and return.
11 - When your writing gets stalled,
where do you turn or return for inspiration?
I don’t usually experience much stalling
in my writing, because my inspiration usually comes from everyday encounters
rather than a separate “creative state.” It’s less about waiting for ideas and
more about noticing when language starts forming around ordinary moments.
Often, it’s something very small. An
overheard phrase. A brief interaction. Or a visual detail that carries
emotional weight. Those moments tend to accumulate until they become poems
without needing a deliberate search for inspiration.
When I do feel stuck, I don’t try to
force new material. I return to observation: walking, listening, being in
public space, or simply paying closer attention to how people speak and move. I
also find that reading other authors or attending live readings helps reset
that attention, because it reminds me that language is always happening around
us.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of
home?
Home, for me, is less a single scent
than a composite of sensory memory. It’s made up of older, more fragmented
impressions of place: pine trees along the Adriatic, my mother’s goulash stew,
freshly printed comic books in mid-80s, elevators in old socialist
buildings—the kinds of everyday smells that accumulate quietly during childhood.
At the same time, I don’t think of
home as something fixed enough to be reduced to one thing. It shifts depending
on where I am and what life stage I’m in. At this point, home is as much
Seattle as anywhere else, so even the salty air of the Pacific and the smell of
hiking through the woods have become part of that definition.
13 - What influences your work beyond
books—nature, music, science, visual art?
My influences are layered and come from multiple directions. Nature is a
constant source of inspiration for me, especially being around large bodies of
water—on them, near them, and moving through them. There’s something about that
physical space that often finds its way into my poems.
Contemporary global events also shape
my work in an ongoing way, particularly the way violence and conflict are
mediated through news cycles and constant digital exposure. That repeated
filtering of reality inevitably becomes part of the emotional atmosphere of the
writing.
Finally, my scientific research
strongly informs how I think about identity. I don’t see identity as a fixed trait,
but as a dynamic cognitive structure shaped by experience, association, and
context. That framework quietly underpins a lot of how I approach both writing
and observation.
14 - What writers or intellectual
influences matter most to your work?
Charles Bukowski is an important influence on my work—not for any formal approach,
but for the rawness and directness of his voice. There’s something instructive
in his refusal to embellish experience, his commitment to staying close to the
grit of lived reality. I find that clarity useful as a reminder that emotional
force doesn’t require explanation or excess framing.
Leonard Cohen, on the other hand, is
central for very different reasons—especially his sense of musicality in
language and his spiritual dimension. His work often feels like it sits between
poem and song, where rhythm, repetition, and cadence carry as much meaning as
the words themselves. I’m drawn to how his lyrics operate almost liturgically
at times, moving between intimacy and transcendence, and how he uses spiritual
themes not as abstraction but as lived emotional space. That blend of musical
structure and metaphysical inquiry is something I return to often in my own
writing.
For me, both of these influences sit
in productive tension: Bukowski pulls me toward immediacy and unfiltered
presence, while Cohen pulls me toward musical form, spiritual depth, and
layered meaning.
15 - What would you like to do that
you haven’t yet done?
I would like to record an album. A fair number of my poems already exist in a
song form, and I would like to bring them fully into that space and record
them. Some of them feel like quiet, acoustic ballads, while others lean more
toward something raw and energetic—almost punk in tone and delivery.
I’ve had an idea for a record called
something like “Soft and Hard” maybe, structured as a kind of dual
experience: a Side A made up of more reflective ballads, and a Side B that
shifts into something louder, more confrontational, borderline punk. It feels
like a natural extension of the emotional range that already exists in my writing.
16 - If you could choose another
occupation, what would it be?
If I
weren’t a research scientist, I would most likely devote myself more fully to
writing and poetry. In reality, though, I already don’t see these as entirely
separate occupations. My scientific work and my poetry are both ways of
engaging with the same central question: how human identity is formed,
internalized, and reshaped over time.
In my
research work, I study how early evaluative systems—both automatic and deliberative—develop
in childhood and how they shape identity, attitudes, and decision-making.
My
poetry approaches the same questions from a different angle—through lived
experience, language, and memory. I often write about displacement, trauma, immigration,
and the slow process of rebuilding a sense of self in a new language and
culture.
Because
of that, I don’t really experience science and poetry as separate paths, but as
complementary ways of thinking about the same problem. One uses data and
controlled methods, the other uses voice and form, but both are ultimately
trying to understand how identity takes shape and how it changes across
contexts, places, and languages.
17 - What made you write, as opposed
to doing something else?
Writing emerged out of necessity more than choice. Growing up through
displacement and moving across countries and continents meant constantly
renegotiating identity, language, and belonging. Writing became a way to
stabilize and examine those shifting internal landscapes.
It also evolved alongside scientific
writing, where English became a primary mode of expressing myself. Over time,
writing became less of a separate activity and more of a shared structure
across different parts of my life.
18 - What was the last great book or
film you experienced?
Two recent films that stayed with me are I Love Boosters and Silent Friend, and I find it interesting how differently they operate emotionally
and formally.
I Love Boosters
feels expansive, energetic, almost chaotic in its forward momentum—it leans
into movement, social texture, and a kind of outward-facing intensity. Silent
Friend, by contrast, is restrained, observational, and inward-looking. It’s
a film built out of silence, slowness, and attention to what happens at the
edges of human connection.
That contrast is something I also
recognize in my poetry. I tend to move between those two dimensions: at times
writing in a more direct, emotionally charged voice, and at other times working
through restraint, fragmentation, and silence. Both approaches are ways of
dealing with the same underlying question—how experience becomes language, and
how much of it can be shared with others so it resonates on a deeper level.
19 - What are you currently working
on?
I’m currently working on several chapbooks that explore war, migration,
identity, and political tension from both personal and global perspectives.
Politics Is a Whore
focuses on contemporary geopolitics, imperial violence, and the contradictions
of modern democracies, shaped by my experience of growing up during the Bosnian
War. Honey Is Thicker Than Blood turns inward toward home, belonging,
and cultural inheritance, reflecting on what is carried across
displacement—language, memory, and childhood landscapes. Ghosts With
Passports explores the emotional reality of immigration itself, moving
between political critique and intimate immigrant experience, and asking what
it means to live across borders of geography and identity. Together, these
projects form a broader attempt to understand how trauma, memory, and belonging
continue to shape who we become long after displacement.
I also continue to be deeply engaged
with Speak Out Seattle, an ongoing community poetry and performance
series that has grown into a sustained platform for artists across Seattle.
What began as an open mic has become a long-term effort in community-building
and cultural infrastructure—creating space for voices that might otherwise
remain unheard.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
