Ginger: Your suggestion that writers bear at least some responsibility for the deluge of submissions is a good one; it seems obvious, of course, but it's easy to miss. Too many poets compose quickly and submit promiscuously (!), often without having any idea what a particular editor's slant is (and there's nothing wrong with an editor's having a slant; that's part of what editors are for). So poems circulate like Continental dollars, declining steadily in value, and as in somebody's law of currency (Gresham's?), the bad drives out the good -- or at least swamps it.
At the risk of sounding as if I'm defending editors, I'll add that in my experience an MFA doesn't carry much weight. If anything, it can hurt a poet's chances with many editors. They know full well that creative writing programs need to keep their enrollments up even while granting degrees that are pretty much a drug on the market, so who ever flunks out of a second or third-tier MFA program? For that matter, who ever gets a C in a graduate creative writing course?
I should add, though, that at their best the programs provide the kind of environment that is tough for a writer to find these days: the companionship of other serious writers, sober instruction and criticism, and useful models. And those things can happen at some obscure little college every bit as easily as at one of the more prestigious places. But as with the sheer volume of submissions, there are so many mediocre or worse writers bestowed with the MFA label that the good ones are probably best off not mentioning that they have one.
Maybe all this means that we've established a defacto meritocracy: credientials don't mean anything, so you'd better be good, so good that even an editor's cursory glance reveals something worth looking at in more depth.
RPW
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