According to the Judaic scholar Gershom Scholem, the danger of golem-making is not that the creature will escape its master and, like Dr Frankenstein’s monster, run amok, but that the tensions involved in the creative process might harm its maker. This golem of Kabbalistic origin has no practical function; it is a creature who ceases to exist outside the ritual that conjured it, much like a poem. In this workshop, participants will explore the parallels between golem-making and writing poetry, tracing the development of the golem from its origins to its more contemporary incarnations. Underpinning this genealogy is an approach to language as an ecstatic creative force, which its practitioners believed could be harnessed by anyone. Participants will look at poetry from Paul Celan, Tomaž Šalamun, and James Lasdun, among others, and will then be invited to produce their own poetry – ecstatic or otherwise – in response to the constellation of ideas arising from this topic.