Form of poetry created by Danish polymath Piet Hein
A grook (
Danish: gruk) is a form of short aphoristic
poem or rhyming
aphorism created by the Danish poet, designer, inventor, and scientist
Piet Hein. He wrote over 7,000 of them from 1939 until his death in 1996, mostly in Danish[2]. The grooks are multi-faceted and characterized by
irony,
paradox, brevity, precise use of language, rhythm and
rhyme, and an often
satiric nature. Many of the grooks have an accompanying line drawing, which provides additional meaning. This webpage[3] contains many volumes of gruks in Danish.
There is also a CD, in which Piet Hein reads some gruks.
Some say that the name "gruk" is short for "grin & suk" (
lit.'laugh & sigh'), but Piet Hein said he felt that the word had come out of thin air. The contemporary "Hunden Grog" ("Grog the Dog") stories by fellow cartoonist
Storm P. have, in public opinion, been regarded as an inspiration.
A Grook as passive resistance
Piet Hein was president of the Anti-Nazi
Union when the Germans invaded Denmark in 1940.[5] He became an underground passive resister. He found a way to encourage resistance
through the use of poems, which he called "gruks" ("grooks" in English),
and began publishing them in the daily newspaper "Politiken" under the pseudonym
"Kumbel Kumbell"[7].
Grooks in English
Beginning in the 1960s, seven volumes of English translations of 53 grooks each were published and became popular in the U.S. counterculture of the time: Grooks (1966),[8] Grooks 2 (1968),[9] Grooks 3 (1970),[10] Grooks 4 (1972),[11] Grooks 5 (1973),[12] Grooks VI (1978),[13] and Grooks VII (1984).[14]
The following books of grooks are available on this subpage[15] of the website
"Peit Hein".
^This webpage[1] is a database of over 7,000
gruks by Piet Hein, in Danish. The page says (in Danish) that you can freely search it and have them emailed directly to you.
^A long article in Life Magazine[4] talks about Piet Hein's becoming a passive resister beginning
on page 63. It corroborates what is said here. At the time, he thought
there would be 4-5 grooks, not the ~7,000 that he later wrote. He says that the word "gruk" came to him out of empty air.
^ "Here is the reason why: Piet is the Dutch form of the name Peter or Petrus, which means rock, stone, and Hein is a way of spelling 'hen', the old Danish word for a whetstone. 'Kumbel', or 'kumbl' as it strictly speaking should be written, also means stone, though more a grave monument. In other words, Piet Hein, or Stone Stone can, in a way, be translated by Kumbel Kumbel. He originally wrote the second word with two Ls, also later the signature became just Kumbel – the name he is at least as well known by as his own."[6]