An Introduction to Piet Hein

Remember Piet Pieterszoon Hein, the Dutch naval hero of the 17th century, from History class?

Fast forward three hundred years or so in the family tree, and you get Piet Hein, 20th century Danish mathematician, scientists, poet. Following the Nazi occupation in Denmark, Piet began publishing his short poems dubbed Grooks in various newspapers.

These Grooks are no longer in print, but you can still find collections of them on Amazon.

Here's an example:

THE EGOCENTRICS

People are self-centered
to a nauseous degree.
They will keep on about themselves
while I'm explaining me.

As you can see, it's short. ABCB rhyme scheme. But apart from being short, quick, and fun, it manages to get a solid point across in a very efficient manner. It reminds readers not to be so quick to judge others for faults they may too posses. The fault in question being egocentrism. It also points out the tendency of egocentrics to discover others' egocentricity when they are no longer the subject of discourse. 

All this is done without explicitly saying that. It's done in a teasing, self-referencing manner. Here's another example:

IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN
A poet should be of the
                  old-fahioned meaningless brand:
obscure, esoteric, symbolic, --
              the critics demand it;
so if there's a poem of mine
              that you do understand
I'll gladly explain what it means
              till you don't understand it.
This one here speaks directly to Hein's brevity. On the one hand, he remains brief, and simple in message, which is to point out that there are quite a number of interpretations of his works. 
It is difficult to discern which lines, if any, are written sarcastically. The first three certainly seem to be, that a poet should be obscure and symbolic. Yet Hein directly responds to that claim by stating that his poems can be interpreted in as obscure a fashion as one would want. Yet the whole thing remains brief to the end.
One final example: 
MAJORITY RULE

His party was the Brotherhood of Brothers,
and there were more of them than of the others.
That is, they constituted that minority
which formed the greater part of the majority.
Within the party, he was of the faction
that was supported by the greater fraction.
And in each group, within each group, he sought
the group that could command the most support.
The final group had finally elected
a triumvirate whom they all respected.
Now, of these three, two had final word,
because the two could overrule the third.
One of these two was relatively weak,
so one alone stood at the final peak.
He was: THE GREATER NUMBER of the pair
which formed the most part of the three that were
elected by the most of those whose boast
it was to represent the most of the most
of most of most of the entire state --
or of the most of it at any rate.
He never gave himself a moment's slumber
but sought the welfare of the greater number.
And all people, everywhere they went,
knew to their cost exactly what it meant
to be dictated to by the majority.
But that meant nothing, -- they were the minority.

This one, as you can see, is a tad longer. This longer poem stands as a minority among his other works, much like his party. It seems as well to be poking fun at politics, particularly the democratic system. It is long to confuse, and to illuminate countless subdivisions in which there is a majority in each smaller segment, only to remind us that it still doesn't matter since they're a minority.
After all, one may subdivide eternally, but the whole never gets any bigger or smaller. It is in essence Zeno's paradox.
Piet Hein is a very accessible poet, in the sense that his work can be read by even those with the attention span of a squirrel, reading only 4 lines at a time. Yet it is also dense enough/thought-provoking enough that it shan't be immediately dismissed by a poetry lover either.