What is popularity (in poetry land)?

In real life, I think I'm rather unpopular, which is fine, because I don't really care all that much about popularity or big circles of casual friendship. I'd rather have one or two or three close personal friends.

But in poetry land, this sometimes feels weird and semi-contradictory. I have plenty of people whose poetry I love. I have plenty of semi-casual semi-friends who I occasionally interact with, in terms of poetry and semi-personal exchanges. However, I personally find it hard to spend a lot of time semi-casually socializing and focusing on poetry at the same time. I usually tend to focus more on my personal alone time involving poetry. Sometimes this causes me to lose more friends, because I'm not casually sociably communicative enough.

My poetry tends to extract the negativity out of my system, temporarily - and then it comes back and then I need to extract it again. I love genuinely positive people, but I am not one of them. I spend a lot of time and energy and effort expressing/extracting myself through my poetry, because I feel like I have to.

One semi-side-effect I've noticed in recent years is that since I've accumulated a small but ongoing multitude of poetry publications and published chapbooks on an ongoing basis, for years, I feel as if less people are interested in my creative work, because they're more interested in the ongoing public-focused social butterflies and/or the NEW.

Maybe I seem like an old writer who is just spewing out publication after publication, even though that is not really the case. Maybe the old writer part is semi-true, because I've been working on my poetry for over 25 years and still sticking with it, with a genuine adherence and passion. But usually when I accumulate a small collection, I've been working on its content for several years.

But sometimes I feel as if my ongoing publication credits and chapbooks cause me to look like a more prolific writer than I actually am and cause my work to get less attention, since it looks like small press publication after publication, and just another chapbook by me. Sometimes it seems like people with fewer publications get more attention and/or accolades, because their work seems fresh and new and exciting, instead of just ANOTHER poem or chapbook by the same old person.

But it's not like I spew out my poetry or dash off my manuscripts. The writing itself usually takes a lot of time and then I assemble it into a manuscript, which also takes a lot of time. So however it might look to others, my assembling a new poetry manuscript is a lengthy process that I repeatedly choose to undertake.

I'm thinking about this kind of stuff now, because for about the last two years, I've been working on some individual poetry, some collaborative poetry, plus the individual poetry within the new poetry chapbook manuscript I finally accumulated and published, and now that that's done, even though it's completion was extremely recent, I already feel weird that I don't have any new poems left.

So should I focus on promoting the new chapbook I just published? Or should I step aside from the new chapbook I just published and focus on new poetry? I used to work hard on self-promotion (and still do to some extent), but I don't really feel like explaining my poetry to other people. I feel like, read it if you want to and interpret it however you interpret it. But on the other hand, if I don't promote it to an extent, then how will anyone else even become aware of its existence? I mean, it's not like I have 100 close poetry friends promoting my poetry and it's not like I'm popular.

And it's not like I'm new or young or fresh or a social butterfly. 

I'm more like a middle-aged woman with a divergent wing span that keeps on slowly but surely creating poetry that sinks down, rises up, sinks down.

Of course there are all different kinds of colorful beautiful butterflies.