A poet engaging cultural memory might use a specific object, a quilt pattern, a recipe, a gospel melody, a folk saying, as the vehicle through which an entire history becomes present, showing how cultural memory is carried in material and performative forms rather than only in texts; Lucille Clifton's poems draw on cultural memory by treating specific family histories as condensed versions of larger collective histories, finding in her grandmother's migration story the whole pattern of the Great Migration; The spirituals function as vehicles of cultural memory not only in their content but in their performance, the act of singing them together being itself an act of communal remembrance and identity affirmation; Gwendolyn Brooks's attention to the specific details of Bronzeville life, the exact cost of a meal, the precise furnishings of a poor home, performs cultural memory by insisting that these ordinary details deserve to be preserved; A student poet might write about the experience of learning a traditional practice from an elder, exploring the cultural memory transmitted through embodied teaching rather than language, and what is at stake in that transmission's continuation or loss; Natasha Trethewey's concept of native guard extends cultural memory to include the suppressed history of Black Union soldiers who guarded Confederate prisoners in Louisiana, insisting that the official Civil War memory that excludes Black soldiers is impoverished and dishonest