The primary way people are introduced to poetry is through major anthologies and classrooms, or at least that's the way it has been for the past couple generations. But the internet can change all that as it presents new ways and opportunities to expose people to poetry. Maybe poetry doesn't have to be so arcane after all, and this is especially valuable considering the number of poets with top quality material but don't make it into the major channels of eduation and distribution. Anyway, there are a few good essays online about Fearing which are helping to give him the exposure he deserves. First, from 'On Fearing's Poetry' at MAP:

Desire in Fearing's poetry circulates through a highly orchestrated and technical habitus of radios, magazines, tickers, boulevards, dance-halls, theaters, and clinics that all are wholly rigged for commodity exchange. In such a setting, one's full social being is constantly deferred and dispersed across a network of alienating subject positions of collectors, salesmen, movie queens, and magnates. Into this dehumanizing scene, Fearing deploys the verbal techniques of black humor, parody, and burlesque to unmask the ways in which advanced capitalism solicits subjects ideologically. Employing anaphora, the poet's relentless direct address to "you," the reader, seizes on the language of sales advertising so as to subvert its all too familiar categories of textual representation.

And from another essay at MAP, 'Kenneth Fearing's Carreer', which explains why I have little interest in Carl Sandburg but a lot of interst in Fearing:

He also takes over much of Sandburg's subject matter: cityscapes, working-class and criminal characters, and upperclass fools and scoundrels. But Fearing is no Sandburg clone. He is wittier than Sandburg, with a gift for parody that Sandburg lacks, and more impersonal, more pessimistic, and more cynical. Moreover, he also writes under the influence of the High Modernists, especially Eliot, and is therefore more experimental than Sandburg and more daring in his violation of traditional standards of logic, coherence, and literary decorum. And to this strange amalgam of the Sandburgian and the Eliotic, he makes three contributions of his own: the frequent use, and not always ironically, of a defiantly trite "unpoetic" vocabulary; an occasional fracturing of normal grammar (though never in the manner of Cummings); and a frequently oblique, offbeat approach to otherwise unoriginal subject matter, dramatic situations, or themes. When to all of this is added Fearing's gift for precise but unexpected and quirky turns of phrase, the result is a body of work that escapes easy classification. If Fearing occasionally sounds like another poet, no other poet ever sounds like Fearing.

Finally from the essay 'And Wow He Died As How He Lived' at Poetry Foundation, which is where I originally became familiar with Fearing's work:

During the darkest days of the Great Depression, artist Alice Neel painted a surreal portrait of her friend, the poet Kenneth Fearing. In it, the gaunt 33-year-old stares out through owl-rimmed glasses, eye sockets hollow from exhaustion and hunger, a gaping hole in his chest. There, a grinning skeleton perches, spilling a river of blood.

These were dark times. And Fearing was the poet for them.