Allen, I saw
that article, too. The young fox was killed.
But that's not the scenario I'm picturing, if we all submitted our poems to
The New Yorker.
I'm picturing
Ray Bradbury's short story "There Will Come Soft Rains," in which a fully automated, soul-less system just keeps humming along without human intervention.
I suspect that some dusty, forgotten server at
The New Yorker receives unsolicited electronic submissions, waits a pre-set amount of time, generates an automatic rejection, and purges itself--all without any human being (other than the poet) paying any attention whatsoever.
If I'm correct, no one at
The New Yorker would know or care if a bunch of poets all sent in a wave of submissions. Perhaps not even if that wave reached the level of a denial-of-service attack.
As for
Poetry, I think increasing the workload of the student screeners would just make them even more inclined to make snap judgments of the "Oh, this rhymes--I don't have to read any further to reject it" variety.
I think both venues operate on the assumption that, for the most part, anything worth publishing will be brought to their attention by the handful of literary agents who already have the editors' personal phone numbers and email addresses.