F0NO11 // Charles Valle – Proof of Stake: An Elegy (print; book)

About the Author

Charles Valle was born in Manila, Philippines and immigrated to California when he was seven years old. A valedictorian of his class at San Clemente High School, Charles proceeded to earn an AS in Chemistry from Saddleback College, a BA in English from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in Poetry from University of Notre Dame. After Graduate School, he moved to Brooklyn, NY and worked as a Media/Technology Editor for Macmillan/McGraw Hill during the day while acting as the Managing Editor for FENCE Magazine/Books at night. Since 2006, he has served as one of the Poetry Editors at FENCE Magazine. He has been a judge or a reader for over two dozen literary contests and fellowships, including the National Poetry Series, Summer Literary Seminars, Millay Colony, and others. Over the past twenty years, his work has been published in numerous publications, such as Denver Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, and others. Charles currently resides in Portland, OR where he works as a Change Manager for Nike as well as serves on the Board of Directors for the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC). 

Praise

PRAISE FOR PROOF OF STAKE: AN ELEGY

Proof of Stake is tenderly radical, a poem pneumatic with contradictions, the Miltonic oak, the anti-Miltonic “quasiclusterfuck”. Valle carries his lost loved one close against his chest as he soars through centuries, continents, climates, colonialisms and profit motives, seeking both to register her and protect her from the shitty banns of human time.  This is virtuosic writing that abjures writing, naming that abjures naming, a history that abjures histories, and finally abjures its own virtuosity. Yet the love and the desire to continue loving can never be rubbed out. The poem concludes not with consolation but with the resolution to go on with this devotional quest, this simultaneous making-unmaking, to escape form and “widen the aperture… Dark, more dark.”

–Joyelle McSweeney

“How do we continue when so much depends/ On stable interfaces communicating?” With Proof of Stake, Charles Valle produces a text of mourning wherein the unspeakable and unacceptable loss of his infant daughter, Vivian, entwines with the inheritances that would have been hers – the unstable interfaces of contemporary life born of colonialism, racism, and global capitalism. That is to say, the inheritances that are ours. Line-by-line, phrase-by-phrase, Valle, who knows there is no real relating to the living or the dead without attending “histories wrought with erasure,” develops a “poetics of grief,” “An integral/ Lower limit memory/ Upper limit intertextuality.” Here, the limits of memory carry the beloved as detail, as tender subject of address, as name. Drawing on textual material as varied as the late sixteenth-century colonial Boxer Codex and today’s hashtags, Proof of Stake’s upper limit opens to the suffering, past and present, of all living things. How do we continue? Diamond-scarred with the integrity and generosity earned only by unspeakable grief, Valle realizes a way: “If not in outrage, then in poetry/ If not in poetry, then in song.” Proof of Stake is that poetry, is that song.

–Karla Kelsey

Charles Valle’s Proof of Stake is the distillation of “desolation after song.” A book-length elegy mourning an inconceivable loss to which the speaker is tethered, it as much asserts and interrogates languages, politics, histories, memories, and poetics. Imbued with heartbreak and rage, Valle, with “the portability of grief,” travels in search of transcendence to return to a reconfigured landscape of his making.

–Joseph O. Legaspi

“And when I think of the phrases unturned” in the aftermath of loss, Charles Valle writes, “I am reminded of the histories / Wrought with erasure.” How does one move forward, how does one write, when “grief has become so decentralized” that our shared languages for compassion burn in the ashen husk of colonial afterimage? Valle’s Proof of Stake: An Elegy reanimates the elegy form from the detritus and syntagma of global capitalism’s death-drive, localizing its song of grief, anger, and compromised beauty in a heartbreaking apostrophe to his daughter Vivian. Written in the dark heart of pandemic, Valle’s cathartic work reimagines “the possibilities of desolation / after song,” in which the curated artifice of “the global” collapses under the weight of quarantine malaise, generational trauma, and the cruel burials language enacts on the dead and the marginal. Where the voice is unwoven from its hold on human contact, a sound of mourning rises in the apertures where history leaks out and soaks the ground of the representable in a profligate futility. Epistolary modes fail, accidental hashtags fail, lyric beauty fails, aestheticized melancholy fails, the very act of writing fails because: “How do we continue when so much depends / On stable interfaces communicating?” Valle explores (and explodes) the polyglossic failure of language to accommodate the unspeakable cadences of grief — at a time when the self-reflexivity of an accelerated historicism blurs the boundaries of the self and the voice — and he pieces together a counternarrative from the shards of an unresolvable debt beyond the corrosive mediation of social-media-speak and the infernal recurrence of colonialism. Where “there are no words / there are words,” and Proof of Stake compels us to listen to the sound absence carves on the skin of remembrance.

–Jose-Luis Moctezuma

Charles Valle’s Proof of Stake is at once an elegy for his daughter, a lament for the opaqueness of life, an exploration of one of the greatest themes of poetry—the failure of poetry—and ultimately a questioning of what it is to be human. As he sits on the floor of the hospital where his daughter comes into then out of life, we travel the corridors of his mind, bearing witness to the absurdities, cruelties, and erasures that link us to each other and the past: from those of a person’s private grief to cultures flattened by conquistadors, histories never written, forgotten, left to decompose, or translated into the bloodshed of Hollywood catharsis.… The language of this meditation is simple, its insights profound and deeply felt: a powerful expression of our shared existence—a poetic triumph.

–Steve Tomasula

Charles Valle’s poetry collection Proof Of Stake is an impassioned and necessary exploration of grief and mourning. Valle grieves the loss of his child, Vivian, while also confronting the confounding world of past-present colonial occupations with acts of deep resistance. In this fierce lyric sequence, he confronts racial injustice, and the fragile and violent present affairs of the human and natural world. Understandably, throughout the book, Valle’s poems reside in the inconsolable space where finding words to articulate deep loss may be impossible but he summons them for a function and a powerful address to Vivian whose death has left him to muddle in the impenetrable space of reaching:  “Tumble into words, Vivian. I want/My words to organize around grief/ And contribute to the economy/Of suffering.” His economy is in the poem’s ability to shape the suffering. In this sequence, we see how the lyric drives the modulations of the speaker into definitions that unearth and absorb deeper meaning from the affairs of the state around the speaker-griever, and allow the him to drop in and out of the world’s cruel consumption and exploitation of bodies, of souls, to a greater reckoning with grief.

–Prageeta Sharma

“And when I think of the phrases/unturned,/The lines not breaking, the words/That will never ring for you,/Vivian, I am reminded of the histories/wrought with erasure,” are among the astonishing lines that open Charles Valle’s Proof of Stake, a book-length elegy about his late daughter Vivian, who passed away shortly after her birth in 2011, and to whom his long poem is addressed. At once Howl, Somebody Blew Up America, and The Disintegration Loops for our pandemic and new Yellow Peril era, Valle’s extraordinary poem is further proof of the stake that 21st century experimental BIPOC poets’–including Kamau Brathwaite, M. NourbeSe, Fred Wah, Jordan Abel, Douglas Kearney, Barbara Jane Reyes, and Aldrin Valdez–continue to claim in the elegy to explore and create powerful new modes of grieving and protest. “Let me tell you about/ my poetics of grief”, Valle’s speaker offers, mourning Vivian’s absence yet absorbing “the opposite of decisive moments”, so that they might “invent a new plasticity of language,../And strike these words to widen the aperture/To blur the background, all that baggage/In buttery bokeh, unrecognizable/Dark”. Let me tell you this about Charles Valle’s debut book of poetry: Proof of Stake breaks new ground for the elegy, and your heart along with it. A brilliant, moving, and unforgettable work.

–Paolo Javier

Press

Brain Mill Press

Poetry Northwest