I just happened on Loren Webster’s beautifully done blog and these posts about Richard Hugo. His blog’s title, “in a Dark Time,” obviously comes from the incantatory Theodore Roethke poem of the same name (which Webster admires here); as you remember, Roethke was the subject (along with James Wright) of a recent essay by Adam Kirsch, who writes: “Decades have now passed since their sadly premature deaths—Roethke’s in 1963, Wright’s in 1980—and today they need to be reintroduced to a generation of readers who are likely to know them only from a few anthology pieces.” While thoughtful and appreciative, Kirsch’s analysis of Roethke’s poetics isn’t entirely right, I think, but the piece is an excellent reintroduction to both poets and their relationship to modernism and the (masuline, deeply feeling) self. Roethke also had more boisterious fun on the page than a lot of poets—there are notable exceptions—let themselves have these days, Billy Collins or no Billy Collins (indeed, when I saw Collins read it seemed to me he was a very melancholy man). Roethke was often ferociously depressed. But his poems are pure joy and, if you haven’t read them yet, will delight you. “His best and most characteristic poems concoct a new language for the shapeless urges of the unconscious,” writes Kirsch, who later quotes Roethke (who was, endearingly, a Lit-Law major at Ann Arbor): ” ‘Believe me,’ he adjured the reader in a 1950 ‘Open Letter,’ ‘you will have no trouble if you approach these poems as a child would, naively, with your whole being awake, your faculties loose and alert.’ ” Look at Loren Webster’s Merlin falcon, too. The shapes a bright container can contain!

From today’s Times, some superstore-sized news. Stuart Elliott writes:

FOR the first time in the 80-year history of The New Yorker magazine, a single advertiser will sponsor an entire issue.

The Aug. 22 issue of The New Yorker, due out Monday, will carry 17 or 18 advertising pages, all brought to you by the Target discount store chain owned by the Target Corporation. The Target ads will even supplant the mini-ads from mail-order marketers that typically fill small spaces in the back of the magazine.

The Target ads, in the form of illustrations by more than two dozen artists like Milton Glaser, Robert Risko and Ruben Toledo, are to run only the one time in the issue. They are intended to salute New York City and the people who live – and shop – there.

Many mainstream magazines like Time and Life have published what are known as single-sponsor issues, carrying ads only from marketers like Kraft Foods and Progressive insurance. Target has been a sole sponsor before of issues of magazines, among them People.

The goal of a single-sponsor issue is the same as it is when an advertiser buys all the commercial time in an episode of a television series: attract attention by uncluttering the ad environment.

“We try to do breakthrough things in many different places,” Minda Gralnek, vice president and creative director at Target in Minneapolis, said in a telephone interview.

” ‘Expect more. Pay less’ is our mantra,” Ms. Gralnek said, quoting the Target slogan, “and this is part of ‘Expect more.’ It’s not ordinary.”

The drawings in the Target ads will feature subway motifs, street and park scenes, a dog walker, a cocktail party, even a bridge rendered as a shoe. All the ads, not surprisingly, feature the Target bull’s-eye logo in one way or another, like a giant game of ring toss with the Target targets circling a skyscraper.

“We had a list of New York icons” that might appear in the ads, Ms. Gralnek said, but in the end “these were the rules we gave the artists: the ads had to use the Target bull’s-eye and had to have New York themes.”

The artists were also asked to draw using only three colors to help the ads stand out: red and white, for the Target logo, and black.

Neither Target nor The New Yorker, part of the Condé Nast Publications division of Advance Publications, would discuss what the sponsorship cost. A look at the magazine’s rate card suggests that a retailer like Target, which has advertised steadily in The New Yorker since 2003, would pay a bit under $1.1 million for the ads. But it is unclear whether a discount retailer whose slogan is “Expect more. Pay less” would pay, uh, retail.

For those worried that The New Yorker may be blurring the line between editorial content and commercialism, executives of the magazine and Target offered reassurances that there would be no equivalent of The New Yorker mascot, Eustace Tilley, staring at a butterfly through a monocle covered with a Target bull’s-eye.

“The editorial integrity of our product is a big thing,” David Carey, vice president and publisher of The New Yorker, said in an interview at his office in Times Square.

“People often say, ‘We’d like to do something in The New Yorker that’s never been done before,’ but we have high standards,” Mr. Carey said. “There are some ads we don’t accept if they break the format of the magazine.”

So while The New Yorker will run “a few scent strips a year” and gatefold cover ads, he added, the magazine has rejected ads in formats like the Dutch door, when a front cover, split in two, unfolds to reveal an ad inside.

Target was not told in advance what the editorial contents or the cover of the issue would be, Mr. Carey said, and there is to be no editorial acknowledgement of the sponsorship. (An ad identifying the illustrators is to run in the back pages of the issue.)

The ads were designed to look different from the cartoons that decorate the pages of The New Yorker, Mr. Carey said. For example, none of the ads are to have captions.

Mr. Carey said that he informed the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, that the issue would have Target as its sole sponsor and that the arrangement would not affect the editorial department in any way.

Mr. Remnick, asked for a response, replied in an e-mail message, “Ads are ads, and I have no problem at all with Target’s advertising a lot, all at once, or a page at a time.”

Target and The New Yorker have been planning the issue for several months, working to find a week when the magazine could clear out all its other advertisers. The mid-August date “was an easier time to do it,” Mr. Carey said, because “if you want to own an entire issue” there are typically fewer advertisers during the dog days of summer than, say, during the holiday shopping season.

The few advertisers that had initially booked ad space in the Aug. 22 issue are being shifted to the Aug. 29 issue, Mr. Carey said.

In addition to the ads that will run on the pages of the Aug. 22 issue, there will also be a Target ad under the flaps that wrap the covers of the issues to be sold on newsstands.

The New Yorker issue joins a lengthy list of catchy marketing and promotional ploys from Target. They include opening so-called pop-up stores, which remain in business only a few weeks; decorating the outsides of office buildings with oversize Target billboards; and hiring acrobats and dancers last month to walk down the side of 30 Rockefeller Center in a “vertical fashion show.”

Many of Target’s special ads are aimed at New York City for reasons that include a desire to burnish the image of its stores among fashionistas in the garment district and burnish the image of its corporate parent on Wall Street. There are five Target stores in three New York City boroughs: the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens; so far, to contradict a famous Lorenz Hart lyric, Target does not have Manhattan (or Staten Island).

Ms. Gralnek said she was aware that some Manhattan shoppers, seeing all the Target ads in a borough that has no Target stores, have expressed frustration.

“If it does make some people want a Target more, that’s not a bad thing,” Ms. Gralnek said, adding that they could “get to the other stores” in the outer boroughs or visit the 53 Target stores in the metropolitan New York area, including Long Island and New Jersey.

True, but is there a magazine called The Long Islander, or The New Jerseyan?

Actually, no less a New Yorker than Walt Whitman founded a paper called The Long Islander in 1838, and the Long-Islander in print today recently won six New York Press Awards. Headlines from this week’s edition: “Huntington Spas: The Royal Treatment,” “Sedaka Brings Classics To Westbury,” and, aptly, “What’s in a Name”?