I love the New Yorker numbers here. I think they are just mid-directed. What
if this same number sent their poems to the offices of The White House. Just
confront George B. and his staff with massive amounts of poetry. No email.
Just piles of former trees as poems filling and falling off his front, side
and pack porches. And, when that's enough, send more to Crawford for his
vacation reading.
Can't you hear him at Press Conferences, or yelling to reporters as he gets
in and out of his helicopter, "I am drowning in poetry."

In the face of such a combination of abundance and over-production, just a
thought this morning.

Stephen V


>> 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.
>>