The IX EIPOEMA International Poetry Gathering in Madeira and Porto Santo, October 25–November 1, 2026 — Poetry, Autonomy, Translation, and the Literary Bridges Connecting Macaronesia and Its Worldwide Diasporas

There are oceans that separate continents, and there are words that make the distance disappear. Between the volcanic shores of the Azores, the mountainous landscapes of Madeira, the sunlit islands of the Canaries, and the Atlantic horizons of Cape Verde, an ancient conversation has never entirely ceased. It has traveled in the voices of sailors and emigrants, in the silences of departure, in the memories of those who remained, and, perhaps most enduringly, in the poetry of those who have attempted to give language to the immeasurable experience of belonging to an island while imagining the entire world. It has traveled, too, across the immense human geography of the diaspora: from the Azorean and Madeiran communities of California and New England to the Portuguese neighborhoods of Canada, from the Cape Verdean communities of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and other parts of the American East Coast to the descendants of Canary Islanders who established new lives in Cuba, Venezuela, the Caribbean, and distant corners of the Americas. These are not disconnected histories of departure. They are chapters of a larger Atlantic narrative in which the islands have continuously extended themselves beyond their geographical boundaries, creating new landscapes of belonging without entirely surrendering the emotional territories of their origins. Poetry has always possessed this extraordinary capacity: to transform geography into intimacy, distance into recognition, and the solitude of an island into a universal condition of the human spirit.

From October 25 to November 1, 2026, Madeira and Porto Santo become the meeting places for precisely such an encounter. The ninth edition of EIPOEMA — the International Poetry Gathering of Macaronesia — brings together writers, scholars, translators, and cultural voices in a celebration whose significance extends far beyond the reading of poems. Under the evocative theme Poetry, Thought, and Autonomy, and integrated into the commemorations of fifty years of autonomy, this gathering invites us to contemplate the profound relationship between literary expression, cultural identity, and the freedom of communities to articulate their own understanding of the world. Organized by the Associação Cultural Sol da Vida, with the support of regional and local institutions, the gathering unfolds through readings, conversations, literary panels, exhibitions, and encounters that affirm poetry as both an artistic undertaking and a form of intellectual citizenship. Yet its deepest meaning may lie in something less visible than its ambitious program: the recognition that the four archipelagos of Macaronesia share not merely an oceanic geography, but an extraordinary literary inheritance, one shaped by isolation and openness, by departures and returns, by the persistence of memory and the restless human desire to transcend the boundaries of birthplace. The gathering offers an opportunity to imagine the Atlantic not as a geography of separation but as a vast cultural commons, where the languages of different island societies may encounter one another without surrendering their distinctive histories, and where the literary voices of the diaspora may participate as essential contributors to the continuing evolution of island identities.

Four Archipelagos, One Ocean of Imagination

The Atlantic is not an empty space between islands. It is an immense archive of human experience, a living repository of departures and arrivals, of longing and discovery, of languages transformed by movement and memory. For centuries, the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape Verde have inhabited the paradox of insularity. Their communities developed distinctive ways of speaking, remembering, celebrating, and imagining existence, while remaining intimately connected to distant continents through navigation, migration, commerce, and cultural exchange. The sea that surrounded them also carried their voices outward. Each archipelago possesses its own literary traditions, its particular historical experiences, and its unique relationship with language. The Portuguese-language poetry of the Azores and Madeira, the Spanish-language literary inheritance of the Canaries, and the rich Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole expressions of Cape Verde reveal distinct cultural universes. Yet these differences are precisely what make their encounter so intellectually and artistically fruitful. Macaronesia should never be understood as a single cultural identity imposed upon four different island societies. Its beauty resides in the possibility of recognizing affinities without erasing distinctions, of discovering that cultural diversity need not prevent the emergence of a shared intellectual and imaginative space.

An Azorean poet contemplating the volcanic landscape of São Jorge may discover an unexpected resonance in a Cape Verdean poem about drought, departure, or longing. A Madeiran writer exploring the relationship between mountains and memory may encounter a kindred imagination in the poetry of the Canaries. A poet from Santiago may recognize in the language of an Azorean or Madeiran emigrant the same tension between affection for the homeland and the necessity of leaving it. A Canarian writer reflecting upon the historical migrations to Cuba or Venezuela may discover that the emotional architecture of departure is remarkably similar to that experienced by generations of Cape Verdeans who crossed the Atlantic toward New England, or by Azoreans and Madeirans whose descendants now inhabit cities and agricultural communities throughout North America. The vocabulary may change, the historical circumstances may differ, but the fundamental human questions remain remarkably familiar. What does it mean to belong to a place that the world considers peripheral? How does one preserve a homeland after leaving it? Can an island remain an island when its people have carried it into distant countries? And how does poetry transform the apparent limitations of geography into the limitless possibilities of imagination? These are not merely literary questions. They are among the central questions of island existence, and they acquire even greater urgency when considered through the experiences of migration, cultural transformation, and the transmission of identity across generations.

The importance of EIPOEMA lies in creating a space where these questions can be explored collectively, not through the language of administrative boundaries or economic indicators, but through the more enduring vocabulary of human experience. In this sense, the gathering represents an intellectual geography of the Atlantic, a literary map drawn not by political borders but by the movement of ideas, languages, and memories. It reminds us that the islands of Macaronesia have never existed in cultural isolation, even when their physical remoteness encouraged outsiders to regard them as peripheral. Their literatures belong to the broader histories of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and their writers have contributed to the imaginative understanding of migration, identity, language, and the relationship between human beings and the natural world. To bring these literary traditions into conversation is to recognize that the Atlantic itself has been one of the great creative spaces of modern history, a place where different civilizations, languages, and experiences have encountered one another, sometimes painfully, sometimes fruitfully, but always with consequences that continue to shape the world.

The Fifth Archipelago: The Diaspora

There is, however, another archipelago that deserves a permanent place at this literary table. It cannot be found on conventional maps. Its islands are scattered across continents, separated by highways, cities, generations, and sometimes by languages that no longer resemble those spoken by the first emigrants. It is the archipelago of the diaspora, an immense and constantly evolving human constellation that extends the cultural geography of Macaronesia far beyond the Atlantic islands themselves. For the Azores and Madeira, this archipelago stretches across California’s San Joaquin Valley, the Portuguese communities of New England, the metropolitan landscapes of Toronto and Montreal, the historical settlements of Brazil, and the many destinations where island emigrants and their descendants have established new lives. The Madeiran diaspora also possesses particularly significant historical and cultural connections with Venezuela, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and other regions of the world. These communities have created institutions, literary traditions, cultural associations, newspapers, religious celebrations, and family networks that have preserved aspects of their island inheritance while continuously adapting to the societies in which they live. They have demonstrated that emigration does not necessarily mean the disappearance of cultural identity, but rather its transformation into something more complex, layered, and sometimes profoundly creative.

The Cape Verdean diaspora offers one of the most compelling illustrations of this phenomenon. Its historical presence along the eastern seaboard of the United States, particularly in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, forms an extraordinary chapter of Atlantic migration. Communities in New Bedford, Providence, Pawtucket, Brockton, Boston, and other cities have preserved and transformed Cape Verdean cultural traditions across generations. The history of Cape Verdean migration to New England, closely associated with maritime labor, whaling, and the search for economic opportunity, has produced a remarkable cultural inheritance in which music, oral history, poetry, Creole language, and the experience of racial and cultural identity occupy central places. These communities are not simply distant extensions of Cape Verde. They have become essential participants in the making of Cape Verdean culture itself, contributing to its artistic vitality, intellectual development, and international recognition. Their literature reveals the complexity of belonging to several worlds simultaneously, of remembering islands through the landscapes of American cities, and of sustaining a cultural imagination shaped by Africa, Europe, and the Americas. To speak of Macaronesian poetry without acknowledging this profound Cape Verdean presence on the American East Coast would be to overlook one of the most significant examples of how island cultures acquire new dimensions through migration.

The Canary Islands have likewise created a far-reaching diaspora whose historical and cultural significance deserves greater attention within any comprehensive understanding of Macaronesia. Generations of Canarians departed for Cuba, Venezuela, Uruguay, Argentina, and other destinations throughout the Americas, carrying with them distinctive traditions, linguistic expressions, agricultural knowledge, and cultural memories. Their descendants became part of the social and cultural histories of their adopted countries, while maintaining, to varying degrees, a sense of connection with the islands from which their ancestors had departed. The historical relationship between the Canaries and Venezuela is particularly revealing, demonstrating how migration can create enduring cultural affinities between territories separated by thousands of miles of ocean. In Cuba, too, the Canarian presence became an important component of the country’s social and cultural formation. These experiences have generated literary expressions of displacement, adaptation, nostalgia, and hybrid identity that deserve to be placed in conversation with the diasporic literatures of the Azores, Madeira, and Cape Verde. The emigrant from Tenerife or La Palma, like the emigrant from São Miguel, Terceira, Madeira, São Vicente, or Santiago, carried more than personal belongings into the unknown. Each carried a particular way of imagining the world, a language shaped by geography and history, and a memory of place that would often survive in the lives of descendants who had never seen the ancestral island.

These dispersed communities are not peripheral appendages to the cultural lives of their homelands. They are extensions of those lives, transformed by the experience of migration. The diaspora is not simply the place where islanders went. It is also the place where island identities acquired new meanings. A poem written by an Azorean or Madeiran descendant in California may contain the vocabulary of American life and the emotional geography of an island the writer has never visited. A Cape Verdean poet in Massachusetts may inhabit Portuguese, Cape Verdean Creole, and English simultaneously, discovering within this linguistic plurality a distinctive literary voice. A Canarian writer in Venezuela or Cuba may reconstruct an ancestral homeland through family narratives, inherited expressions, and the fragments of memory that survive across generations. Such literature reminds us that belonging is not exclusively determined by residence. One may leave an island without the island ever entirely leaving one’s imagination. Sometimes the most revealing literary portraits of a homeland emerge from the distance of exile, where memory is no longer merely recollection but becomes a creative act. For this reason, gatherings such as EIPOEMA should be understood not only as encounters among four Atlantic archipelagos but also as opportunities to incorporate their dispersed communities into a larger cultural conversation. The diaspora constitutes a fifth, invisible archipelago, one whose shores are made of memory and whose geography is continually redrawn by language. To include its writers, translators, scholars, and readers is to acknowledge that the cultural future of Macaronesia cannot be confined to the physical boundaries of its islands. It belongs equally to those who carry the islands elsewhere.

Translation: The Most Generous Form of Literary Hospitality

Among the most significant dimensions of this year’s EIPOEMA is the attention given to literary translation. The program includes a panel devoted to Literature: Poetry and Translation, recognizing that the encounter among different literary traditions requires more than the physical presence of writers in the same room. It requires the willingness to enter another language, to discover the hidden architecture of another literary imagination, and to accept that the deepest cultural exchanges often begin with the difficult and beautiful task of listening. Translation is one of the most profound acts of cultural generosity available to literature. A poem exists first within the intimate architecture of its original language, with its particular rhythms, historical resonances, emotional associations, and silences. To translate it is not merely to replace words with their equivalents. It is to recreate a living experience within another linguistic universe. The translator must listen not only to what the poet has written but also to what the poem suggests, conceals, remembers, and leaves suspended between its lines. Translation is, therefore, both an artistic undertaking and an ethical responsibility, an acknowledgment that another person’s imagination deserves to be understood beyond the boundaries of the language in which it first found expression.

This undertaking is especially important for the literatures of island societies, whose voices have too frequently remained outside the dominant circuits of international publishing. How many extraordinary Azorean and Madeiran poets remain unknown to English-language readers? How many Canarian literary voices have never crossed the boundaries of Spanish? How much of the poetic imagination of Cape Verde, expressed in Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole, awaits the translations that might introduce its beauty and complexity to new audiences? How many literary works produced within the diasporas of these four archipelagos remain confined to small readerships, despite their extraordinary potential to illuminate the universal experiences of migration, belonging, and cultural transformation? These are not questions of literary prestige alone. They concern cultural visibility, intellectual exchange, and the right of smaller literary communities to participate fully in the world’s conversations. A literature that remains untranslated risks being misunderstood as a regional curiosity when, in fact, it may contain some of the most compelling expressions of universal human experience. Translation challenges this imbalance. It insists that the emotional universe of an island poet deserves the same attention as that of a writer from any major literary capital. It allows the local to become universal without surrendering its particularity, and it makes possible an encounter between readers who might otherwise never discover one another.

For the diasporas of the Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde, and the Canaries, translation assumes an additional and deeply personal significance. It can become the means through which descendants recover access to literary traditions that linguistic assimilation has gradually placed beyond their reach. A third-generation Azorean American may know only fragments of Portuguese, yet encounter through an English translation the emotional world of a poet whose experiences illuminate the family’s ancestral history. A young Cape Verdean American in New England may discover through bilingual editions the richness of a literary inheritance that speaks directly to the complexities of cultural identity. A descendant of Madeiran emigrants in South Africa or Venezuela, or of Canarian families in Cuba or elsewhere in the Americas, may encounter ancestral literature through a language acquired in the adopted homeland. Translation does not replace the importance of preserving ancestral languages, nor should it become an excuse for abandoning their teaching. Rather, it offers an additional pathway toward cultural knowledge, one that recognizes the linguistic realities of communities shaped by generations of migration. It opens doors that might otherwise remain closed, allowing literature to become a place of return even for those who can no longer speak the language of departure.

Bruma Publications: Building Bridges Through Books

During the past three years, this conviction has been central to the work of Bruma Publications, the publishing initiative of the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute at California State University, Fresno. Born from a commitment to expanding the international presence of Portuguese and Azorean literature, while also recognizing the wider cultural importance of Madeira and the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic, Bruma has increasingly embraced translation as an essential instrument of cultural connection. Its work has sought to bring poetry, fiction, history, and literary criticism into dialogue with English-language readers, particularly within North America, where communities of Portuguese ancestry coexist with universities, libraries, literary institutions, and new generations of readers whose relationship with the ancestral language may be limited or entirely absent. This mission also offers a model for broader collaboration with the literary communities of Cape Verde and the Canaries, whose diasporas share many of the same challenges of linguistic continuity, cultural visibility, and intergenerational transmission. For these readers, translation is not an accessory to cultural preservation. It is often the very condition that makes cultural discovery possible. A young Portuguese American who cannot read a novel in Portuguese may nevertheless encounter the literary imagination of the ancestral homeland through an English translation. A university student studying migration, ethnic identity, or Atlantic history may discover in an Azorean or Madeiran literary work a perspective unavailable in conventional historical narratives. A scholar of comparative literature may recognize in a translated island poet an unexpected contribution to contemporary discussions of memory, displacement, ecological consciousness, or cultural identity.

These possibilities have guided Bruma’s publishing mission. Through collaborations with publishers and cultural partners in the Azores and beyond, including Letras Lavadas and other editorial initiatives, Bruma has worked to expand the circulation of literary voices that deserve a wider international readership. Its translation projects have encompassed poetry, novels, essays, and historical works, while its associated literary platform, Filamentos — Arts and Letters, has provided a continuing space for bilingual literary dialogue, criticism, artistic discovery, and the presentation of writers across geographic and linguistic boundaries. The importance of this undertaking lies not merely in the number of books published or translated, but in the cultural relationships those books make possible. Every translation is an invitation. Every bilingual edition is a bridge. Every literary collaboration is an affirmation that the Atlantic should be understood not as a barrier to cultural participation but as a space through which literature can circulate, evolve, and encounter new generations. The experience of Bruma Publications during these three years demonstrates what can emerge when literary commitment, academic engagement, editorial cooperation, and a genuine belief in the cultural value of smaller communities come together. It also suggests how the work of translation can become an enduring instrument of cultural cooperation among the four archipelagos and their worldwide diasporas.

Imagine a sustained publishing initiative through which poets from the Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde, and the Canaries could be translated into Portuguese, Spanish, English, and, where appropriate, Cape Verdean Creole. Imagine anthologies that would place the literary imaginations of these islands in conversation, accompanied by critical essays and historical reflections that would illuminate both their affinities and their differences. Imagine universities in California, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Canada, Portugal, Spain, Cape Verde, and throughout the Atlantic world introducing students to Macaronesia not only through geography or political history but through its poetry. Imagine Cape Verdean American students in New Bedford encountering the poetry of Madeira, Azorean descendants in California reading the literature of Cape Verde, and Canarian descendants in Latin America discovering the imaginative worlds of the Azores and their diaspora. Such an undertaking would be more than a publishing project. It would be a declaration that the Atlantic possesses a shared literary future worthy of sustained attention, and that the cultural inheritance of its island societies belongs not only to those who continue to live upon their shores but also to the millions whose family histories have carried those islands into the wider world.

Poetry, Autonomy, and the Freedom to Imagine

The inclusion of EIPOEMA in the commemorations of fifty years of autonomy offers another important dimension to this encounter. Autonomy is often discussed through constitutional arrangements, institutional structures, political responsibilities, and the distribution of administrative powers. These matters are essential to the democratic life of island societies. But autonomy also possesses a cultural dimension that cannot be adequately measured through legislation or public policy alone. A community exercises cultural autonomy when it possesses the confidence and the means to tell its own stories, preserve its memories, question its inherited assumptions, and imagine its future in its own voice. Literature is central to this process. Poetry, in particular, resists the temptation to reduce human experience to convenient categories. It preserves contradictions, explores uncertainty, and gives expression to those aspects of collective existence that institutional language frequently overlooks. A poet may celebrate an island while questioning its limitations. Another may honor ancestral traditions while challenging their authority. A third may discover in the experience of emigration a more expansive understanding of identity than any fixed definition of homeland could provide. These are not betrayals of belonging. They are manifestations of its intellectual vitality.

Cultural autonomy cannot mean the preservation of an unchanging image of the past. It must also include the freedom to reinterpret that past, to acknowledge its complexities, and to create new expressions of collective life. The presence at EIPOEMA of discussions devoted to poetry and aesthetics, poetry and thought, and poetry and autonomy suggests a welcome understanding of literature as a participant in the larger intellectual life of society. The event’s program also brings literary conversation into contact with the arts, public institutions, and the landscapes of Madeira and Porto Santo. Its movement between the two islands reinforces the idea that poetry need not remain confined to auditoriums or academic settings. It belongs wherever human beings gather to listen, remember, and imagine. In the context of Macaronesia, this cultural understanding of autonomy also invites a broader reflection upon the relationship between the islands and their diasporas. The descendants of Azorean and Madeiran emigrants in North America, Cape Verdean communities along the American East Coast, and Canarian descendants throughout Latin America have all participated in the preservation and reinvention of island identities. Their cultural expressions remind us that autonomy, understood as the freedom to create and articulate a distinctive cultural identity, extends beyond institutional jurisdictions. It also lives in the books people write, the languages they preserve, the memories they transmit, and the new artistic expressions that emerge from encounters between ancestral traditions and adopted homelands.

An Atlantic That Must Continue Speaking

There is something deeply moving about the image of poets gathering in Madeira and Porto Santo while the Atlantic continues its ancient movement beyond the shores. The same ocean touches the Azores, the Canaries, and Cape Verde. It has witnessed departures that divided families, voyages that transformed societies, and generations of people who carried their languages into unfamiliar worlds. It has also carried books, letters, songs, and poems. From the Azorean and Madeiran communities of California and New England to the Cape Verdean neighborhoods of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, from the Canarian descendants of Cuba and Venezuela to the many other places where the children of these islands have established new lives, the Atlantic has become an immense geography of memory. For those of us whose lives have unfolded between islands and continents, literature has often been the most faithful companion of displacement. Books have allowed us to recover places that time has altered, to recognize voices that distance has obscured, and to discover that the experience of migration need not result in cultural disappearance. Sometimes, indeed, distance deepens the desire to understand. Sometimes the ancestral homeland becomes most visible through the imaginative clarity of those who have lived far from its shores. And sometimes a poem written in an adopted language becomes the most intimate expression of a belonging that has survived generations of geographical separation.

That is why gatherings such as EIPOEMA matter so profoundly. They remind us that poetry is not an ornamental activity reserved for moments of leisure or cultural celebration. It is one of the means through which communities understand themselves and recognize the humanity of others. They also remind us that the cultural wealth of Macaronesia should not remain fragmented among four archipelagos and their scattered diasporas. Its literatures deserve to meet, to be translated, to be studied, and to circulate with the freedom of the ocean itself. The work undertaken by Bruma Publications at PBBI–Fresno State belongs to this larger aspiration. Through translation, publishing, and literary dialogue, it has sought to ensure that the voices of the islands may be heard far beyond their immediate shores, without losing the particular accents, histories, and imaginative landscapes that make them distinctive. The continuing development of such work offers possibilities for meaningful cooperation among writers, translators, publishers, universities, and cultural institutions across the Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde, the Canaries, and their worldwide communities. It invites us to recognize that the future of island literature cannot be separated from the international circulation of books and ideas, nor from the indispensable participation of the diasporas that have carried the cultural inheritance of these islands into new languages and societies.

Perhaps this is where the future of gatherings such as EIPOEMA may become most consequential: not only in the beauty of the poems read during a memorable week, but in the books that will emerge afterward, the translations that will introduce new voices to unfamiliar readers, the academic collaborations that will sustain literary study, and the friendships that will continue long after the participants have returned home. A poetry festival reaches its fullest significance when it becomes the beginning of something larger than itself. The four archipelagos of Macaronesia already share an ocean. Their diasporas have extended that ocean into the cultural landscapes of the world. What remains is to strengthen the bridges of language, imagination, and mutual recognition that will allow their literatures to travel more freely among them. There is an extraordinary possibility in imagining a future in which an Azorean poet is read in Cape Verde, a Madeiran writer is studied in California, a Cape Verdean voice is celebrated in the Canaries, and the literature of the Canarian diaspora becomes part of the intellectual conversation in universities and cultural institutions across the Atlantic. Such exchanges would not diminish the individuality of any of these literary traditions. They would enrich them through the recognition that cultural identity becomes more meaningful, not less, when it enters into genuine dialogue with others.

For an island is never merely a piece of land surrounded by water. It is a way of seeing the world, a particular relationship between landscape and memory, a human community whose imagination has been shaped by the simultaneous experience of geographical limitation and infinite horizons. A poem is never merely a collection of words arranged upon a page. It is a way of making that world available to another human being. And translation, at its most beautiful, is the moment when one shore recognizes itself in the distant light of another. Perhaps that is the enduring promise of EIPOEMA: that somewhere between Madeira and Porto Santo, between the Azores, the Canaries, and Cape Verde, between the islands and their dispersed children, poetry may accomplish what geography alone cannot. It may bring us together without demanding that we become the same. It may allow us to belong to several places without ceasing to love the first. It may remind us that the homeland is not diminished when it is shared with the world, that a language becomes richer when it welcomes another, and that the literature of a small island may contain the emotional immensity of an entire ocean.

And perhaps, when the final poem has been read and the participants have departed from Madeira and Porto Santo, what will remain will be something more enduring than the memory of a literary gathering. It will be the renewed conviction that the Atlantic is not merely a vast expanse of water separating human communities, but an immense and unfinished book whose pages are being written in Portuguese, Spanish, Cape Verdean Creole, English, and the many other languages of migration. Its authors live in the Azores and Madeira, in Cape Verde and the Canaries, in California and New England, in Venezuela and Cuba, in Canada, South Africa, Europe, and wherever the descendants of these islands have learned to make another place their home. Their voices are different, their histories are not interchangeable, and their experiences cannot be reduced to a single narrative. Yet together they compose an extraordinary literary constellation, one that deserves to be read, translated, celebrated, and passed to generations still to come.

For the sea separates our shores, but poetry teaches them to speak to one another. And when those voices are translated, the islands cease to be distant places on a map and become, once again, part of the same boundless human conversation.

Diniz Borges
Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute — California State University, Fresno
Bruma Publications | Filamentos — Arts and Letters