So, a few days back I contacted the editor of Rattle as I said I would. Since this thread continues, I thought I'd report back on his response.
I told him I posted poems on workshop forums that were public, in the sense that anyone who knows where to look can find them, but that they were hidden from search engines.
I also told him that sometimes "traces" of the poem might show up in search, in the form of a few lines appearing at rssing.com that might show up in a search, but in these cases, the poem would have already been deleted from the site.
He said neither case would cause a problem. He said he doesn't want subscribers reading poems they've read before. He said that technically the general rule is that if a poem is accessible online, it counts as published, but what he doesn't know won't hurt him.
So basically, he doesn't mind if they're workshopped off radar, he doesn't even mind that searching for the poems may show that they've been work-shopped in the past, he just doesn't want to be able to find them when he looks. So this tends to suggest that, at least for Rattle, ensuring that a poem is gutted/culled before it's submitted would seem to be enough, given that Alex already ensures that search engines don't cache copies of the poems.
-Matt
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