PROOF OF STAKE : AN ELEGY
Book Cover Photo Courtesy of Fonograf Editions
Proof of Stake is a multivalent meditation on loss, grief, and social constructs. Grounded in the death of the poet’s daughter, Vivian, this long elegy ruminates on a wide range of subjects, from the effects and winding paths of disruptive technologies, such as paper and cryptocurrency, to critiques and observations of art movements, diasporas, social unrest, and the history of the Philippines. Charles Valle’s debut collection, details how “[t]here is an emotional debt accrued/ In grief, compounded daily by wordless songs.” “It’s 2019 and there’s a man who wants me/ to go back to where I came from…There’s a man who wants to/Teach me a lesson on supremacy/There are people who want me to believe in one history.” According to Valle the only solution to this, then, is to refuse and resist— poetically, culturally, politically, every which way.
Praise for Proof of Stake
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
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
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).
A Make/Learn/Build grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC) made the publication of this project possible. Fonograf Editions gratefully acknowledges RACC for its help and support.
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