I once got two ballast poems accepted in one week. The stuff I thought was better got rejected. Murphy's Law, I suppose.
But a note to the Brits in particular, It's really much, much easier to know your market on this side of the Atlantic. The number of publications is much smaller (e.g. in Ireland), as presumably, is the number of people submitting to them. In the U.S., every fleabag university has a literary journal. There are tens of thousands of people with MFAs in poetry. Nothing's really centralized, and relatively few pubs are readily availble--even in Nueva York. My research, when I first started submitting, involved going into the Columbia Library periodicals room and just reading pubs, jotting down the ones where I thought I might have a remote chance of placing something. Generally remote. But unless one does very little besides read litle magazines, there's simply no way one can read one's way through the market.
I'd also have to say that a fair number of my publication successes went through editors I at least vaguely knew. Or who were aware of knowing someone I know. Or something like that.
Quincy
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