re:Virals 541-1

Host comment (Keith—managing editor):

Commentaries on the week’s poem are in the main post, re:Virals 541. One contribution, however, merits special attention and is exceptionally here given a supplementary post of its own. It is a lengthy but outstanding essay by Orense Nicod, taking the poem as a platform for developing many interesting and insightful threads including a parallel between religious authoritarian rules or proscriptions and those of anglophone haiku.

You may or may not share all of Orense’s assertions and conclusions, but they are full of insight and persuasively argued. Thoughtful comments, counter-propositions, and discussion are welcomed in the comment thread below it, open for a week.

The verse was:

   
Show me the sutra 
In which the Buddha praises
The colors of beer.
 —Barry Foy, Haikuniverse, November 18, 2025

Orense Nicod:

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him” is one of the most famous Zen kōans. The phrase, attributed to Linji Yixuan, is not advocating literal violence but instructing students to let go of attachments to conceptual authority, externalized enlightenment, and fixed ideas. Barry Foy’s fascinating haiku offered for commentary this week does exactly that. The poem challenges the “rules” of a slant within English-language haiku (ELH) practice that favors prescriptive approaches to teaching the form.

Through its paradoxical request, a sutra in which the Buddha praises the colours of beer, the poem stages the impossibility of codifying experience. The sutra does not exist, and even if it did, it could not be shown, and even if it could, it would not matter. This futility is not a flaw but the poem’s central method. It enacts immediacy, suchness, and the limits of rules by allowing the demand for authority to collapse under its own weight. In doing so, Foy’s haiku becomes not only a meditation on beer and perception but also a metapoetic lesson: a demonstration that doctrine cannot validate experience and that no amount of rule-making can substitute for the lived moment itself.

The poem behaves like a kōan, a brief saying, question, dialogue, or anecdote used in Zen practice to exhaust discursive reasoning and provoke direct insight. A kōan often takes the form of a paradox or impossible request, something that cannot be resolved through logic alone and therefore forces engagement at the level of experience rather than explanation. Foy’s haiku does precisely this.

Zen practice has long embraced apparent simplicity, error, or even “wrongness” as vehicles for insight. What appears to be a novice’s misunderstanding or a conceptual mistake may, in fact, reveal more than a polished, rule-abiding formulation. Misstep becomes method.

To a prescriptive ELH critic, Foy’s haiku may appear naïve, crude, or unsuccessful, a beginner’s poem that violates established norms. It may seem “wrong” or “failed” by conventional standards, yet any such failure exists entirely in the eye of the beholder. On closer examination, each apparent flaw dissolves, revealing itself not as a deficiency but as a pressure point through which the poem performs its work.

I. A Cut That Happens

Perhaps the cardinal sin to an ELH prescriptivist is the absence of a cut understood as a syntactic break, that familiar phrase-fragment structure. Yet this objection rests on a misunderstanding of what a cut actually is. Bashō himself observed that a haiku could contain a kireji and not be cut, and conversely, lack a kireji and still be cut. Cutting, then, is not syntactic in nature. Syntax may reveal or support the cut, but it is not its essence. The cut is first and foremost conceptual, and it can be enacted in many ways, not solely through phrase-fragment construction. Foy’s haiku demonstrates this through an unbroken sentence that nonetheless contains a decisive cut.

The cut in Foy’s poem emerges as logical tension sustained under continuous syntax. It is felt as a turn between the first two lines and the third, an irreconcilable strain between universal and topical, doctrine and experience, ethics and aesthetics. I have encountered countless phrase-fragment haiku that fail to achieve a cut as strong as the one enacted here. A cut is not something one sees; it is something that happens. In this poem, what happens is puzzlement, absence, futility, and ultimately, suchness.

If the haiku were rewritten in a more conventionally imagistic phrase-fragment form, with sutras on one side and the colours of beer on the other, the cut would be exponentially weaker. Only by syntactically binding these elements can the reader feel the strain of their incompatibility. Separation would offer relief; linkage produces pressure. The unbroken sentence and full stop insist on unity and refuse release, and it is precisely this insistence that generates the cut’s event.

Notably, the cut is also enacted metrically, subtly reinforcing the turn. Line two scans as regular iambs, which shift into anapests in line three:

in WHICH / the BUD / dha PRAI / ses the CO / lours of BEER

Metrical play is uncommon in ELH, but there is no principled reason for its exclusion. Meter is a subliminal tool of great efficiency and, far from being artificial, it is the very grain of the English language. If Japanese were stress-timed, Bashō, given his acute attention to sound and rhythm, would almost certainly have used every available means to tune perception.

II. The Failure of Proof

Another feature of this haiku that many haikuists would undoubtedly criticize is its use of capital letters at the beginning of each line, an irruption of Western poetic convention into the haiku form. In 2025, when this haiku was published, such capitalization reads as a deliberate provocation. Minimal capitalization is now the default in ELH, so this choice cannot plausibly be naïve. It functions as a dig at conventionality itself, exposing stylistic norms as matters of taste rather than truth. Capitals may signal any number of things here: a refusal to cosplay Japanese haiku, a localized emphasis within the poem, iconoclasm, or overt meta-commentary. Like the beer in the poem, haiku comes in many colours, capped or uncapped, orthodox or otherwise.

The capitalization also underscores the ternary, syllogistic structure underlying the poem’s request, which supports several coexisting readings.

Reading 1 foregrounds the “colours of beer” and produces hyperbole through praise-by-excess:

Premise: Sutras praise good things.

Observation: The colours of beer are astonishing (therefore good).

Conclusion: The Buddha must have praised them.

This reading follows a straightforward deductive chain, a classical syllogism, humorously applied. It alludes to Mahāyāna sutras, which often operate as exhaustive catalogues of praise. The result is comic inflation; the everyday is elevated to such a degree that the absence of canonical validation feels like an omission.

Reading 2 shifts emphasis to the sutras themselves and inverts the logic:

Premise: Sutras praise good things.

Observation: (If) Sutras do not praise the colours of beer.

Conclusion: Therefore, the colours of beer are not good, or their goodness is uncertain.

Here the poem generates unease. Immediate perception is invalidated by doctrine, and lived experience is subordinated to textual authority. The logic is sound, but the result feels wrong, prompting resistance.

Reading 3 reverses authority entirely:

Premise: The colours of beer are good.

Observation: The sutras do not praise them.

Conclusion: Therefore, the sutras are not complete, or not perfect.

This produces a metacritical reading in which doctrine is judged by experience rather than the reverse. The canon is revealed as contingent, selective, and fallible.

Formally, each syllogism is internally coherent. The paradox does not arise from faulty logic but from the reader’s oscillation between these structures and feeling their mutual incompatibility. Even as the poem invites logical parsing, it exposes the futility of logic as validation.

With or without knowledge of Buddhist doctrine,

the reader senses that such a sutra almost certainly does not exist.

Even if it did, it could not function as proof.

Even if it functioned as proof, it would be irrelevant to perception.

Even if it were relevant, the colours would already have changed.

The plural sharpens the impossibility. The poem is not asking for doctrine about a thing, but for doctrine about variability itself. That request is not merely impossible; it is absurd by design.

The problem, then, lies not in the logic of the arguments but in the act of asking. What the haiku stages is a category error at the root of the desire for validation. The verb praises is crucial. To praise is evaluative and hierarchical. The poem exposes the absurdity of expecting ethical authority and/or spiritual validation to legitimize sensory perception. Colour does not require approval. Beauty does not require sanction. Suchness does not require virtue.

III. The Act of Asking

After all this talk of logic, an ELH prescriptivist might accuse this poem of being too abstract. Yet the direct-address imperative grounds the poem firmly in the present moment. “Show me” is not a philosophical proposition but a demand, an utterance that happens now. In this way, the poem makes abstraction concrete by forcing it to fail in real time. The imperative collapses theory into encounter: the reader is not asked to contemplate a problem but to feel its impossibility. The asking makes absence present.

What the poem is doing is not abstracting away from experience, the usual charge leveled by ELH prescriptivism. It is pointing directly at abstraction itself as a lived, concrete phenomenon. In other words, it is not speaking abstractly about something concrete but speaking about the concreteness of abstraction.

That distinction matters. ELH critiques often assume a simple hierarchy: concrete image equals authentic experience, abstraction equals evasion. But that hierarchy collapses here, because abstraction is shown to be part of the sensory event itself. The desire for a sutra is not a meta-level commentary floating above perception; it intervenes in perception. It alters how the beer is seen, whether it is trusted, whether it is even allowed to be “good.”

Abstraction is not decorative in this poem. It is causal.

Sūtra comes from the Sanskrit to sew, to stitch, to bind together. A sūtra is, first of all, a thread. Not a book, not even a text, but a filament that runs through things. That etymology holds a quiet ambivalence: the thread that connects and gives continuity, memory, lineage and the thread that binds, constrains, fixes, disciplines, sometimes strangles.

A sutra gathers fragments into coherence, but the cost of coherence is selection: this, not that; named, not lived. What is sewn together is also pulled tight.

Abstraction is material reality for humans. We do not encounter the world raw; we encounter it through concepts, categories, names, rules, expectations. Language itself is already abstraction, and yet it is the primary medium through which reality becomes shareable, thinkable, livable. There is no human access to “pure” immediacy that is not already threaded with abstraction.

Seen this way, the poem is rigorously haiku. It records a moment of consciousness as it happens, including its habits, its errors, and its craving for authority. The “image” is not primarily visual but cognitive; the event is not scenic but experiential. The poem does not violate the haiku ethos. It exposes one of its most uncomfortable truths: that immediacy is never innocent, and that abstraction is among the most concrete things we live with.

IV. Time in the Object

ELH discourse often treats seasonality as a keyword, a classificatory label used to distinguish haiku from senryu. In doing so, it mistakes kigo for a signifier rather than a function. However, kigo operate first and foremost as temporal markers. They situate experience in time, not merely in nature.

Foy’s haiku contains no explicit kigo, yet it unmistakably engages seasonality, not as a named season but as process. “The colours of beer” asks the reader to recognize time as something visible and accumulated rather than declared. The poem does not say autumn; it says, in effect, look at what time has done.

Colour here is not aesthetic garnish but evidence. The pale gold of early grain, the amber of maturity, the dark browns and blacks of depth and roasting. Each hue encodes duration, sun received, harvest delayed, grain transformed. Colour becomes chronology rather than ornament.

Each beer carries multiple agricultural moments folded into it. What the poem presents is not a seasonal snapshot but the visible sediment of many seasons compressed into a single perceptual moment.

In this sense, the haiku is panseasonal. It does not isolate one point on the calendar; it reveals how time persists within matter. This reframes any pointing to the absence of kigo here as a misunderstanding of kigo’s purpose. The poem does not reject seasonality; time is made visible and therefore experienced.

Just as Bashō observed that a poem may contain a kireji without being truly cut, it follows that a haiku may contain a kigo without fulfilling the function of seasonality. A dead kigo is one that names a season without activating time. It classifies rather than situates. It tells the reader when in the abstract but does not allow time to be felt as duration, change, or pressure. Like an unearned cut, it performs compliance rather than perception. The season is announced but nothing has happened.

By contrast, a poem can be seasonally alive without an explicit kigo, just as it can be decisively cut without a kireji. What matters is whether time enters the poem as something that acts upon the moment.

Seen this way, kigo and cutting methods are not requirements but instruments. They can fail, and when they do, the failure is not technical but perceptual. The poem has not broken a rule; it has simply not made time or relation happen.

V. Form and the Need for Authority

Another feature likely to raise eyebrows among haikuists, especially in light of the other unconventional elements, is the poem’s full 17-syllable count. In contemporary ELH practice, the maximal syllable count is considered unfashionable. Writers are reflexively encouraged to economize, to strip away any syllable that can be spared.

I am not arguing against compression; there are excellent reasons to pare a haiku down. But there can be equally valid reasons to use the full 17 syllables deliberately, as a marker of tradition and formal presence. Here, the syllable count is neither padded nor ornamental. It carries weight; it insists, subtly but firmly, that this is also a haiku, embedded within a lineage even as it flouts many conventions.

Foy’s poem exposes the futility of prescriptive rules when capturing essence but does not preach. Many so-called “Zen poems” smuggle in superiority: I see through illusion.

Foy’s haiku does the opposite. “Show me” is not a claim to insight but an admission of dependence. It is not epistemic posturing; it is relational speech.

The phrase holds simultaneously and without irony:

A desire for connection: meet me where authority lives; give me a shared ground.

A desire for imitation: show me the sanctioned gesture, the approved way of seeing.

A desire for validation: tell me my experience counts because it has already been counted.

Authority is being addressed because authority is being needed. It stages the ordinary human impulse to borrow weight from tradition rather than risk immediacy alone. The missing sutra would not merely certify beauty; it would dissolve the loneliness of perceiving it without witnesses.

The poem refuses that consolation. No sutra appears. No permission arrives. What remains is the reader, alone with the colours of beer, and with the recognition that the need for validation is itself part of the experience.

The poem does not ridicule this need. It performs it.

Nor does it imagine transcendence beyond it. It shows the mind reaching for authority in real time, inside perception itself. Nothing is resolved. Nothing is purified. What is shown is the habit, naked and present. Haiku often risks pretending immediacy is easy. That suchness is natural and presence effortless. This poem refuses that fantasy. Presence here is uncomfortable. It’s mixed with doubt, with habit and the wish for permission.

That is human suchness.

In this sense, the haiku does not claim Zen insight; it enacts Zen practice. It kills the Buddha not by denying authority but by showing exactly why we keep asking for it.

VI. The Work of Fermentation

An ELH prescriptivist might regard this poem as obscure or even unskilled. I would argue the opposite. The choice of image “the colours of beer” is quietly brilliant. It contains everything the poem requires and nothing it does not.

At first glance, the image appears casual, even trivial. But it is precisely this ordinariness that gives it force. Beer is neither purely natural nor purely cultural; it exists at the threshold between grain and craft, season and technique. Like perception itself, it is something grown, altered, fermented. The image therefore mirrors the poem’s central concern: experience as something both given and processed, immediate and mediated.

Crucially, the image also subverts one of the most entrenched visual clichés of enlightenment: light as pure gold, clarity as brilliance, insight as untainted radiance. The colours of beer are not singular or idealized. They are cloudy, layered, variable. Illumination here is not transcendence but depth; not purity but accumulation. Light has passed through matter, time, and human intervention.

This choice is not accidental. It allows the poem to speak about value, pleasure, and perception without resorting to exalted or rarefied imagery. Beer is humble, social, historical. It carries agriculture, labor, and ritual in suspension. It carries cultural baggage, indulgence, intoxication, unseriousness and impurity. The poem deliberately chooses an object that resists moral elevation, then asks for doctrinal approval of its beauty.

In this sense, the image does what strong haiku imagery always does: it is capacious. It opens outward rather than pointing inward at itself. To call this unskilled is to mistake restraint for simplicity. The image is doing multiple kinds of work at once without announcing any of them. That is not obscurity; it is compression of a high order. The poem does not explain its intelligence. It trusts the reader to ferment with it. And fermentation is necessary for the poem to land. For the brew to clarify, darken, gain body and aftertaste.

Conclusion

This haiku demonstrates how prescriptive approaches misunderstand haiku’s nature, mistaking rules for insight and form for guarantee. I find humour in the fact they are often Zen-inflected in their language while being un-Zen in their method. Foy’s poem does not argue against rules; it demonstrates the futility of treating them as absolute, showing that haiku’s meaning emerges not from compliance or correctness but from the reader’s willingness to dwell within uncertainty, incompletion, and the limits of language itself.

Any commentary on this poem is deeply ironic, and this irony is unavoidable. Zen’s insight is that teachings are provisional, and if teachings are provisional, commentary is too. The moment one takes the poem seriously, one is already inside the irony. If I said, “There’s nothing to say about this poem,” I would be stating something false. Yet there is no commentary position outside the poem’s logic. That is the trap, and that is the insight.

The poem asks for a sutra for the colours of beer. This commentary pursues a theory for futility. Both are knowingly impossible. Both are pursued anyway. Both matter locally and fail universally.

But futility is not the opposite of meaning; it is the condition under which meaning appears. Zen would not object, because Zen does not forbid explanation. It forbids mistaking explanation for arrival.

Kill the Buddha and continue on the road.

re:Virals is co-hosted by Shawn Blair, Melissa Dennison, Susan Yavaniski, and Keith Evetts (managing editor).

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