Sturgeon's Law

When I was trying to learn where and how I might publish poems, one thing I did was read poets I liked, look at the journals they published in, and send to those journals. At first, this didn't work all that well because (A) I was looking at poets who were much more prominent and accomplished than I was, so the journals were often very hard to get into, (B) many of the poets wrote work I admired but that was quite unlike even my better poems, and (C) I didn't carefully consider what sort of poem got picked up by what journal.

But it did work sometimes. My very first poem publication, in Pivot, came because I looked at where some of the rhyming/metrical poets I liked had published work. The first publication I remember feeling excited about, 32 Poems, came about because poets I knew both online and personally talked about the journal and published there--"A Starlit Night," still one of my two favorite B. H. Fairchild poems, had been published there, for example. The first I knew of Bat City Review was seeing Larissa Szporluk's "Cuckoo" on Verse Daily and loving it.

And as I sporadically started to earn more publications, I also noticed that certain people, some names I already knew and some not, mostly relative contemporaries, continued to turn up in the same journals where I was appearing (in the same issue or a different one), so it became a simple matter to follow them around and learn about more journals and send my work where it seemed appropriate.

Edited to add: I cut a big chunk of this post off at the end because there were several things that annoyed me about it, including some really unclear writing. The above is the gist of it.