Style Conversational Week 1105: Send them off in Style; The Empress of The Style Invitational on the Invite's obit poems Washington Post Blogs December 31, 2014 Wednesday 8:34 PM EST Copyright 2014 The Washington Post All Rights Reserved Length: 1291 words Byline: Pat Myers Body I always feel bad -well, it's more of a happy-bad -when there are so many inkworthy entries in a Style Invitational week that even if I run a long list, some great work will go unread simply because readers will never reach the bottom of the column. So the last thing I'm going to do it keep you here when I'd much rather you read the results of Week 1101's retrospective contest. Plus, I have to pregame for my annual New Year's Eve revelry with the Royal Consort: the Cleaning Out of the Refrigerator. I don't know if there are more interesting people than usual on the 2014 Departure Manifest (in either word "more" could refer to), but there will be many to choose from. Wikipedia serves up a handy list, with links to most of their biographical entries. Most of the people on the list are obscure, but perhaps there's a worthy ode to be written about , say, Peruvian Environment Minister Antonio José Brack Egg. I'm happy to run a few identifying words above the poem, but not a paragraph of explanation that will set up your verse. Your subject doesn't have to be "original" -I'd be surprised if I didn't end up running at least one poem about Marion Barry or Joan Rivers or Robin Williams or even Michael Brown -but I tend to receive a number of entries with the same idea (I'll choose the single best setting for it). "No more than eight lines" allows for eight long lines. Long lines are more of a problem in the print Invite, which has narrow columns. (Actually, even short lines sometimes break in the print edition; it's just not set up well for poetry.) Historically, the obit poem contest allows for a bit more sentimentality and less edginess than other Invite contests do. In today's retrospective results, for example, Christopher Lamora's tribute to David Frost was utterly devoid of snark. But in general it's still good for the verse to make some joke -perhaps not at the expense of the subject. In today's example, for instance, Gene Weingarten joked that Dr. Jobe missed out on getting his famous surgery named after him, rather than the baseball player he used it on. Not cruel. Last year's winner, by Gary Crockett, got the bite in by using political humor that wasn't actually about the subject at all, the inventor of the Etch-a-Sketch -a product used as an unfortunate metaphor by a Mitt Romney campaign aide in 2012: Andre Cassagnes, your Etch-a-Sketch showed usWe needn't just tweak, fix and patch.That sometimes the best course, for peasant or POTUS,Is shake and start over from scratch. obit poems You can criticize the subject, but a warmly teasing tone often works best. Also from last year, Rob Cohen's couplet about Al Neuharth, the founder of the pioneeringly short-format USA Today: Al Neuharth died at 89.(No room to publish second line.) There's an easy way to find all the Invite obit poems -the Czar did a contest in 1997 for bad poetry, and I've run them every year since I started, since 2004: Call up Elden Carnahan's masterly Master Contest List and search on "died." The description of the contest is for the week it's announced; look on the right for the link to the corresponding week's results. Ha -just so much great stuff, and yes, a lot of it got robbed once again. As often happens, a lot of the ink went to entries playing off recent events; when it comes to The Style Invitational, "rectal feeding" x "Dick Cheney" isn't going to wait for next year. I didn't notice till the end, but I see that I didn't end up choosing entries from the most recent weeks of Invites; perhaps they were just too fresh in my mind, or it could have just been coincidence. I did remember reading many of the entries before, and at least a couple of today's inking entries had been sent in the earlier contests; Mark Raffman's parody of "Chim-Chim-Chim-Cher-ee" is one. But I'm pretty sure that almost all of today's ink is fresh. (One sort of troubling occurrence: At least one of the entries submitted already got ink; I wonder if the writer had never looked, especially if the entry had run only online.) While it is the 23rd Invite win for Kevin Dopart, it's the first time he's won two weeks in a row. And it's also the second time Kevin has won this year with a tour-de-force anagram: He also won the original contest a year ago, Week 1051, with this astonishing feat: Original text: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Anagrams to: We, the Tea Party of Republicans, our heads in our Rectums, freed to ensure the disestablishment of that Obamacare, promote domestic Religion (provided Jesus is your Savior), disenfranchise the Poor, Effete, Liberal or Such, stifle Intellects not nutty Men, demote Geopolitics, offend on Twitter, do intend another Sequestration. Kevin must have a method for doing these anagrams. Perhaps he'll share it in the comment thread for the Conversational on the Style Invitational Devotees page on Facebook -where his user name happens to be an anagram of "Kevin P. Dopart." Current events continued to hold sway for the second-place prize, for Nan Reiner's zingy double dactyl, with its terrific final line, about the Rolling Stone "reporting" debacle. Be sure also to look at Nan's twin song parodies about "Oklahoma!" and "Fiddler on the Roof" near the end of the column; Nan, who's been tending to her mother in South Florida, sang them into her phone so you can follow the melodies; see the links. A virtual newbie, Ivars Kuscevics (it's Latvian), gets his first "above the fold" ink, and his sixth overall, for his ... yeah, it's an Ebola joke; while not-a-newbie Mae Scanlan gets Ink No. 267 for her super homophone-pun. Mae, by the way, has had a bit of excitement this past month: She'd been given a heart monitor to wear while sleeping, for a routine test (Mae is somewhat north of 50), and "my heart decided to take a vacation from beating for what the doctor called a significant amount of time," she wrote me in an e-mail. But her mind, and her good humor, didn't go on hiatus for even a moment. She concludes: I must say, it proffers a bit of a slamTo see a flat line on one's cardiogram. Mae declares that she fully expects to attend the Jan. 10 Loser Post-Holiday Party. How about you? (See the invitation here.) Please RSVP to me at pat.myers@washpost.com Complain to me in person about the ink you obit poems didn't get -I even got a new tiara for Christmas, so you'll know whom to hector. No, actually, come and do everything but that. I am told that a song is being worked up by two Loser Bards just for the occasion. If you sent your entries in as usual, but did not, as usual, get the rambling but reassuring auto-reply some time later, join the club. It seems that Outlook Exchange, the e-mail system that newly holds the "dropbox" for Style Invitational entries, is especially stingy with the auto-reply: You get it once, for the life of the auto-reply. Evidently this is to prevent an endless back-and-forth in case you also have an auto-reply. But obviously it's an unacceptable restriction, and I'm told that our IT people will address it once more of them get back from vacation. Perhaps we can turn off the auto-reply once a week and turn it back on, and that will work. For now (hopefully just this week), I don't mind if you ask if I received your entries; I can check on them. I also don't mind if you trust the e­mail system. Happy New Year, everyone!