On 9 Jan 2006 at 0:12, Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
> Ah, I'd guess of these Drunken Boats is mine, but wasn't aware that
> your friend was trying to crack it. I had to scale back too, mostly
> because of time pressures, not being able to edit one issue, do the
> html for another, an editor who'd gone on elsewhere, and my work here,
> etc, for the summer issue, and have shifted somewhat to these
> features, like the Latvian feature which another editor put together
> over two years. Even though it says on the submissions page that we
> don't take unsolicited submissions only queries, most of the issues
> are sent to me, like the interview with Aliki Barnstone by an unknown
> writer. So there's not a particular taste or prejudice, the work we've
> published is all over the place. And I haven't for months gotten any
> submissions out of the blue of someone trying to crack the boat,
> perhaps because the email address was being routinely spammed to
> death. So  I changed it recently,  so perhaps your friend should try
> again,

A company that wanted its vendors and customers to maintain a solid 
relationship would be pretty interested in making sure that both could 
get in touch with it, either to place or fulfill orders.

I'm not arguing that poets ought to write to order, or that poetry editors 
ought to place orders with poets for particular kinds of or pieces of 
writing, though I understand that that is what often happens, even if 
more or less subconsciously as "schools" of poets coalesce and 
disintegrate around various notions of what poetry was, is, or ought to 
be. 

What I'm saying is that if you're going to start an enterprise you should 
approach it with a plan and a realization of how much time it's going to 
take when it succeeds. Plan for success. The notion that anyone could 
run a poetry magazine part-time with their left hand seems to be an 
obvious bit of planning for failure. To complain that there were too many 
submissions is to complain about success, or to be woefully ignorant of 
the basic facts about starting a poetry magazine. 

Have you not seen the numbers?  The New Yorker gets over 50,000 
poems submitted each year. Fifty thousand. That's a thousand a week; 
that's 182 a day; that's 22 an hour. That means that if all the New Yorker 
did was open the envelope, remove the SASE, insert the poems 
unopened and unread into the SASE, and put the envelope back in the 
mail (while discarding unread any envelope without an SASE) that it's a 
full-time job just to open the mail and send the poems back unread. If 
every envelope has an average of 4 poems (3-5 is what's recommended 
by most magazines) and you want to do anything like justice by reading 
the poems, you've got to figure a couple minutes per poem. So that's 
100,000 minutes in a year. There are 124,800 working minutes in a 40-
hour work-week year, assuming 100% worker efficiency, which no one 
can do and no one assumes. Something more like 60-70% efficiency is 
what you have to assume of any worker. So that means if you believe 
that the New Yorker is giving every poem submitted a fair chance that 
there are two or three, maybe four or five, full-time people working on 
doing nothing but opening the mail and reading the poems the first time. 
That doesn't count the time it takes to then send the ones that survive 
the first reading to the people who do the second reading, or third, or 
fourth. The New Yorker publishes two or three poems a week, or 
perhaps as many as 150 poems a year, out of 50,000. The winnowing 
process has to be extreme, as well as extremely time-consuming.

Now, if instead of 50,000 poems a year your magazine gets 10,000, that 
means that it may be the case that to open the mail and do the first 
reading is the full-time job for only one instead of for four or five people. 
And that says nothing at all of all the other work an editor must do. So in 
order to get the work of opening the mail and doing the first reading 
down to part-time, you have to limit your submissions to 5000 or fewer in 
any year -- and even then that means that editing the magazine remains 
nearly a full-time job, depending on how much time the further readings, 
layout, correspondence, financing, grant-writing, and the rest take, since 
opening and doing the first reading for 5000 submissions is going to 
take between a quarter and half a year's work. So realistically, if you 
want to do a magazine part-time as a whole, you have to limit 
submissions somehow to 2500 or even no more than 1000 a year, or the 
thing balloons into full-time work rapidly. Even reading 1000 poems a 
year seems daunting, doesn't it? especially when you realize that you're 
reading 1000 poems once, then 300 a second time, then 150 a third 
time, and many of them more often than that as the winnowing process 
grinds on.

Who among you who have edited a poetry magazine realized the 
numbers going in?

But I suppose the thing that most annoys me about the entire poetry biz 
is this casual attitude toward customers and vendors on the one hand, 
and the purported seriousness with which the editors claim they take 
excellence. 

Perhaps poetry editors can get away with not caring about their vendors 
or potential vendors because there is always another one eager to take 
any shit the editor happens to want to give. I've heard the same about 
the music business. Musicians are routinely humiliated and taken 
advantage of because there are so many musicians desperate for a 
record contract that they'll do anything to get one. Perhaps it's the same 
in the poetry biz: there are always poets who will do anything to get 
published, take any shit the editor gives out, so editors are pretty casual 
about the whole process and, in fact, come to think that they're not 
giving any shit. It's just that they're so busy, that their site is being 
spammed, that there are too many submissions, there's just too much 
work to do, and they feel stressed about it, so they feel justified in 
spreading the stress around. They don't answer their mail or their email 
or their phones; they say that the process takes months or years to 
review the poems submitted; they make jerky little requirements about 
paper size or where the name goes or doesn't go or typeface or paper 
weight or number of poems or number of pages or stapled or not or 
cover page or not or letter or not or bio or not or bio and letter but no 
cover page or cover page and bio but no letter or there can be no 
evidence that these poems have been sent elsewhere first, or at all, or 
only email submissions or no email submissions, and on it goes. 

Every poetry editor says he or she wants "the best poems" but not one 
of them can write the specs for "best". The best they can do is "Read my 
magazine and send poems like the ones in it". 

Let's examine that notion. If that isn't asking for writing to order, what is? 
It's saying "Write the way I want you to, and you have a better chance of 
appearing in my journal". It's saying "Write to order; here are examples 
that have succeeded in writing to order in the past". Who can really 
believe that anyone who says such a thing is really looking for "the best 
poems"? They're not looking for the best poems -- they're looking for the 
poems that most closely fit to what they like. It means that what journals 
do in contemporary po-biz is insist that poets reverse-engineer their 
poems: look in the journal you want to publish in, get familiar with the 
kind of poems it publishes, and write like that. What else does "Read the 
magazine and send poems like the ones in the magazine" mean?