In reply to Typesetting Poetry:
> That should stop the submissions...
If your formatting guidelines are too restrictively, it might indeed cause some authors to drop out. You'd need to use very good judgement to create guidelines that you think most authors would find reasonable.
My point was just that if you're trying to get away from wildly inconsistent formatting (including weird formatting that may just be a mistake), then it's better to let the authors know that up front, rather than making formatting changes that will come as a complete surprise to them.