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Well, Marcus, not to deny your take on the numbers (I was a poetry editor for a monthly journal in Canada many years ago, & read about 500 poems per month -- but I could toss many of them after a few lines), but the cynicism here is a tad too much. I'd put it this way: I look at the journal, find that the kind of poetry it publishes is very unlike what I tend to write, & I don't waste my time submitting to it. Or, I find that it publishes the kind of poetry I admire, & maybe I give it a try. I don't write 'for' it, or 'to' its specs, but I also do bother to check it out before I waste time &/or money on submitting. Another reason I never tried The New Yorker <g>... Doug On 10-Jan-06, at 7:46 AM, Marcus Bales wrote: > 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? > > Douglas Barbour 11655 - 72 Avenue NW Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9 (780) 436 3320 the words come down on the white page a dream of snow at mid-Atlantic. Wayne Clifford