Grooks VII - Taschenbuch

A philosophy of a close link between the subjectivity of the fine arts and the objective world of science made Piet Hein (1905-1996) one of the most original Danes of the 20th century. P. Hein was indeed a manysided man in the best sense: he was philosopher, mathematician, designer, scientist, game inventor and author! He also created a new form of poetry he called 'Grook' ("gruk" in Danish). Piet defined art as a way of thinking about all subjects, so for him 'being a poet' was only one outlet for his astonishing creativity. He asserted in his philosophical writings that the great cultural divide was not between the haves and the have-nots, but between the knows and the know-nots. Hein wrote over 10,000 of grooks, most in Danish or English, published in more than 60 books. Some say that the name is short for 'GRin & sUK' ("laugh & sigh", in Danish), but Piet said he felt that the word had come out of thin air. His grooks or gruks first started to appear in the daily newspaper "Politiken" in April 1940 - shortly after the Nazi occupation - under the Old Norse pseudonym 'Kumbel' meaning "tombstone". In more exact terms, grooks are small aphoristic verses characterized by irony, paradox, brevity, precise use of language, sophisticated rhythms and rhymes, revealing in a minimum of words and with a minimum of lines some basic truth about the human condition. Grooks were meant as a spirit-building... In fact, those light, tiny poems - that sound almost like mental improvisations - exorcise the feeling of void or anxiety arising from our unquiet modern times. Amongst Hein's many intriguing creations are the games of Hex, Tangloids, Morra, Tower, Polytaire, TacTix, Pyramystery, and the Soma cube. He advocated the use of the super ellipse curve (see the superellipse opposite along with its math formula) in city planning, furniture making and other realms. He also invented a perpetual calendar called the Astro Calendar.