I think that the solution is to convince fewer people to write poetry. 
Begin by closing down the writing programs that offer the temptation of a 
career, illusory to most.

At 09:46 AM 1/10/2006 -0500, you wrote:
>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?