I read this the other day, from an article posted on the Harriet blog:
"I hate poetry magazines by and large. You get two copies in the mail. One to archive and the other to read for a week and then to give away. Poems, fiction and a sad bit of art or two. It seems like poetry dies in such magazines. All alone with each other essentially. It’s the death of our art form these journals and I say it has to end here. Can’t we get our poems out some other way."
Eileen Myles
And I agree.
I know most people here will disagree, but paper po-mags depress the hell out of me. I don't bother submitting to them anymore. Mainly because I am convinced that only submitting poets and their immediate families will ever read them. And all those poems cheek by jowl, like graves in a suburban cemetery - yerk.
The same goes for books of poems by individual poets. No one reads these either except conscripted friends of the poet. I would MUCH rather get a poem in an anthology than have my own book.
And I would far prefer to get a poem on a high-traffic website than anywhere else.
Anyway, online is the way people are most likely to discover poems these days - and this trend will only increase.
Online mags are really in their infancy, and with refinements in technology they get better and better.
I sing the poem electric!