Ken,

>>How do you proceed when you have no connections in the literary
world?...Get a copy of Poet's Market, find a dowsing rod, and point at the
entries with magnetic properties?<<

This is what I did, and it ultimately worked, but it took a long time, a lot
of patience, and it required me to turn the part of my brain that writes
poetry and turn on the part that knows how to conduct business. I don't mean
business in terms of negotiating a contract or anything like that; I mean
business in terms of knowing how to research a market, track submissions,
pitch my manuscript with the right angle, etc. I spent time in the New York
Public Library reading through back issues of journals; I read through books
published by houses that I admired; I read through an awful lot of websites,
sent email queries that sometimes did and sometimes did not get answered. I
had submissions disappear into the ether and I sometimes got very nice
letters from editors who took my work or wanted to take my work but couldn't
because of space constraints or what have you. Finally, on New Year's Eve of
last year, which seems somehow auspicious to me, I got the call from
CavanKerry Press that they wanted to publish my manuscript.

I don't want to suggest that doing things this way is inherently in any way
better than playing the contest game--and I think you were right to enter
the Poetry contest; why not? A 10 grand prize is nothing to sneeze at--but
it occurred to me just now, reading your post that one thing taking my
approach did for me, other than finally get my book published, is that it
forced me to confront my work from the outside. I really had to get to know
it so that I could talk about it as a book, as something that someone might
buy, a product that I wanted to sell, and while some might say this
ultimately cheapens the relationship between a poet and his or her work, I'm
not so sure. I can talk a lot more confidently about my poetry in a number
of different ways now because I have had to give serious thought about how
to talk about it so that someone else, a professional or serious amateur in
the field, would take it seriously and maybe buy/publish it. And this is
something that playing the contest game did not give me. 

Now it may be that going through an MFA program forces you to think about
your work in this "meta" way; I'm not sure, but I guess what I am saying is
that, at least for me, looking for a publisher the "old-fashioned way"
helped me to take my work a lot more seriously than simply putting the
manuscript in 8 or 10 or more envelopes a year and mailing them off to
conferences. Again, please, I am not trying to create some sort of absolute
hierarchy between these two approaches. Mine worked for me and I am happy
with it for a lot of different reasons. I just wanted to share one of them.

Richard