1 INTRODUCTION: HERITAGE, PERSPECTIVE, AND IDENTITY In their 2010 paper, “Heritage? What do you mean by heritage?,” Marmion, Calver, & Wilkes make a small, but important adjustment to the study of heritage, insisting on the centrality of perspective: “[I]n order to develop understanding of heritage, and to gain insights into its value and relevance for society, the focus ought . . . to be on how individuals perceive heritage in their own terms” (p. 33, emphasis add- ed). As a rhetorician, narrative theorist, and creative writer, who often wrestles with the scripting of herit- age, this proposition appeals to me, even as I realize that the construction of heritage is often not a simple composing matter, but rather a complex one. What is true of heritage is even truer of intangible heritage, which by its very nature is dynamic, shifting, alive and lived, and still truer for the closely related term “identity.” For the immigrant or exiled, the living of a dynamic, shifting heritage identity cannot be avoided; it is a substantial part of everyday lived experience, whether chosen as an act of self-stabilization in unfolding situations, or whether imposed on the individual by others. At the Sharing Cultures confer- ence in 2011, I looked at heritage preservation and identity for a younger generation, the 20-somethings. Their perspective is characterized by hope, by the security of an Azorean homeland even as they emigrate (Eldred, 2011). Here I focus on a generation who emigrated in the 20 th century. Now in their sixties and beyond, they are the immigrants whose age, limited formal education, and love of the “old ways” is belit- tled by the phrase “summer flies.” Although both generations represent Azorean immigrants, the perspec- tive of “living Portuguese” could not be more different, unless these experiences are juxtaposed with Princes, paupers, or summer flies: touring the imagined Azorean Homeland Janet Eldred University of Kentucky Chellgren Professor, Lexington, Kentucky, USA ABSTRACT: Literature is recognized as intangible heritage, that is, as a cultural artifact (potentially) worthy of preservation. However, the relationship between literature and intangible heritage need not end in definition. This paper advances two additional potential relationships. The first is easy: Literature can take as its subject the preservation of heritage. The second construct is more complex: Literature can en- rich the theoretical frameworks used to study intangible heritage. To arrive at this second construct re- quires cross-disciplinary research, using imaginative literature’s capacity to breathe life into the academic terms we use and the critical narratives we plot. It does so in a way that the Russian Formalists believed central to literature, through the act of “making strange,” provoking discomfort with the traditional words and traditional narrative patterns we use to narrate and analyze. Here I will focus on poetic disruptions of terms and plots invoked in discussions of heritage and homeland tours, using one specific poem by Azorean-American writer José Manuel Vicente Jorge Raposo. Sharing Cultures 2013 233