"Nolapoet," in a few comment boxes to posts below, is the poet Robin Kemp. I don't know much about her, but she definitely presents some formidable arguments. I don't know of any poetics blogs with better comments than mine, in fact.

***

The argment was put forward recently that *flarf* is mainly a parody/appropriation of working class/uneducated discourse. Looking at Petroleum Hat, I don't find that at all to be the case. It is a polyphonic language. It includes slang phrases, journalese, political discourse, "mainstream poetry," and the kitchen sink:

so of the rightest critters which will disrobe
the pita of this world this glutton is
the churl to tend, loss of mass of gradients
in the thinner posed contents, the burliest of buds
announces it only with spring seeing
which art maintaining the ornament flesh
of the world, enemy then of individuality
the soft individuality too cruel
the manufacture of a famine abundance is
the flame of the lucre feeds with
individual-substantial fuel
but the contract with the thinking
postpones the luminous eyes
that its tender riot could support this pattern
is made more iffy by decease of time
the color of this beast could never not die
to eat the whorl, by the tomb and the herd

The most notable elements here are words and phrases from Shakespeare's Sonnet I.

FROM fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light'st flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

These words and phrases are scrambled with other phrases, none of which seems specifically proletarian. Indeed, the internet is not the repository of specifically working class language. It is the language of all of us, with an endless number of registers.

I don't know what exact procedure was used to create the text. There seems to be some notion of approximiative homophony, but which pity become "pita" and "creatures" becomes "critters."