Contributor’s Marginalia: Jess Smith on “The glass eye factory” by Julia Shipley


Because you’ve already read Julia Shipley’s acutely alarming poem “The glass eye factory,” I don’t feel guilty when I share with you that the final image has caused me considerable disquiet which has only intensified with further readings. Near the end, the speaker warns us that there is not a “…remedy for the weeping bull’s eye / you’ll soon be…” Shipley leaves us here—vulnerable, complicit—in the final moments of her poem. We become the target when we thought we were the observer. And the target, to paraphrase Celan, is the witness for whom none can bear witness.

Before even reading it, though, the poem is an uneasy feast for the reader’s eyes: First, with a title writ in lowercase; second, with a form that skitters across the page erratically, sliced crossways by four cuspate em-dashes. The eye is already, then, awake to the poem, to the ways it doesn’t wish to comfort us, to its linguistic inversion of the clichés of seeing. The speaker warns us, early, “blink and you’ll miss it.”

For most of the poem, the reader is the watcher. It is the “you” who ogles, the you who could almost pop a glass eye in your mouth like “hard candy”—the you whom the speaker challenges, halfway through the poem, “Try to look the other way.” This end-stopped dare is both taunt and admonishment, a queasy exploration of rubbernecking and the brutality to which we so often bear witness when we do. What do we do, once we look? Are we seeing or are we mistaking, misinterpreting, turning away once the cause begins to seep through the seams of the effect?

Though this poem skips along rhythmically, mimicking at times the lilt of a nursery rhyme (“The place reeks of sweet acetone. / Fuming stink eyes. Better not surmise, / Isn’t it carcinogenic?”), make no mistake that—like most nursery rhymes—this is a poem of death. The poem’s jangly pairing of bright sonics and dark images disorients the reader such that we feel thrust into the “hurricane’s / Cyclops” by the end. How could we not have seen, sooner, that we would always become the “weeping bull’s eye”? While you were surveying the destruction, its agent was surveying you.