[Julie Steiner]

I appreciate all the time and energy and thought that's going into wrestling with these issues.

The word "quality," like "merit," implies that there are objective and universal ways of measuring something that I think is actually--to some degree, at least--in the eye of the beholder. Beholders, by definition, have different perspectives. Someone who hasn't read much poetry, and hasn't yet encountered certain clichés a bazillion times yet, will be more impressed by a poem containing such clichés than a jaded old fart like myself will be.

We tend to support venues whose editors behold things more or less like we do ourselves. We like to be able to trust the taste of the editors of certain venues to recognize the quality of poems that appeal to our own sensibilities.

If a subscriber's definition of quality is significantly narrower than the editor's, the subscriber gets frustrated and doesn't renew.

In contrast, when an editor's definition of quality is significantly narrower than the subscribers', the subscribers might not even notice, because most readers will have no idea of what they might be missing when anything unusual gets cut as substandard.