I confess that getting an acceptance from certain journals makes me especially happy, because I like them, so I’m glad they like my poems; or one of my poems, anyway. That’s not a small thing, to have a handful of memories like that.
But as Michael says, there are individual choices involved: not just about what journals we submit to, but what we want to get out of it. If you’ve got your cap set for a professorship, a book, or the laureate of some state or country, there must be a definite advantage to prestigious placements. However, if you’re ambitions are more modest – or you don’t really have any ambitions in that regard – then what matters most may be a clean, well-lighted place.
It may be different elsewhere than it is in the States, but I would bet that most mid-sized towns have papers with larger circulations than the biggest journals devoted to publishing poems: so as big as you get in the poetry world, it’s still kind of small beans in the way that most people see things. Admittedly, I come from Indiana, but if you told people in my family that you had a poem accepted by the New Yorker, they’d know what it was. The Paris Review? Not so much. That’s why I do favor submitting to some places (because I like them), but don’t really care about a journal’s buzz in the larger poetry world – it’s just not that big a world.
So, as for myself – though I hope to pick up something from the valuable advice others have given on this thread -- I tend to fall on the Jayne side of the road.
Best,
Ed
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