David:
I agree that reviewing is a good way to enter the poetry community, as it were, or to find out whether you're likely to feel at home there. In addition to your points in its favor, consider that as a reviewer you're involved with poetry even when you don't feel much like writing your own stuff. You're obliged to study verse rather carefully, think hard about your opinions, try to substantiate them (all of this in a perfect world, of course: I'm assuming that you want to be conscientious about it). Like (good) teaching, reviewing can make you a better writer, better poet, because at its best it helps you get past the superficiality to which most of us are slaves most of the time just because of our native laziness.
My career hasn't blossomed as your has, David, but I have worked steadily these twenty years, with several hundred reviews in the Seattle Times and many dozens in Light, Sewanee Review, and American Literature, among others (and far from all of them poetry reviews). I don't doubt that many editors have given my poetry an extra moment of consideration because they recognised my name. It doesn't take long until you feel you're part of a big conversation about literature, sometimes as creator and sometimes as commentator. It's a pretty good feeling, if you care deeply about literature in the first place.
RPW
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