Thank you, Luis, for your thoughtful comments. Also, congratulations on your publishing success!

Self-publishing is not the scam it used to be. Thanks to print-on-demand technology, it's possible for companies like Lulu to make printed books available for modest prices to the buyer and little or no cost to the writer. There's also Amazon, of course, for both print and online publishing. One no longer has to spend thousands of dollars and end up with cartons of books that they can hardly give away.

But you're quite right--traditional publishing is the best option for poetry collections. And before one can get a publisher interested in a collection, it's usually necessary to publish a lot of individual poems in a lot of different journals.