For much of the past year, I've been wrestling off and on with an essay that just will not come together. Although the subject matter is linked--historic patterns of self-education among women writers, the relatively late rise of academic certification for poets, the struggles of women poets in the 1950s as that shift in professionalization began to happen--the piece refuses to cohere, and I have yet to figure out why. I have moved sections, added and deleted material, but none of these revisions has opened a door. I'm still trapped in what is more or less the same six-page uglydraft I've had for the past ten months.

Sometimes assassination is the only possible revision strategy. I've given this essay too many chances, and today is the day I kill it. I'm even sort of looking forward to the bloody knife.