...I wish to...defend the hypothesis that it [the poem] may be viewed rhetorically as philosophical commentary on the antagonism between knowledge and understanding...and that the poem unfolds, by means of narrative, the consequences of the choice of "howness" rather than "whyness...."

...it is true that Cummings' perverse ways with grammar permit one to interpret "pretty how" as "how pretty," but another reading is possible. Suppose "pretty" is construed as an adverb, and read as "rather," modifying the adjective "how." Such a construction would drastically change the tone of the line, its implications for the whole poem, and the interpreter's entire pattern of strategies in reading. This reading has the advantage of referring to the town's universally noted involvement in the sheer routines of living. Thus, in much the same way that one would describe a town preoccupied with the oil industry as an "oil town" or another which derives its principal mode of life from livestock as a "cattle town," a "how town" would be a town in which the principal preoccupation is the asking of the mechanical question, "How?" in the sense now applied by engineers: "know-how."

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...All the parenthetical expressions used...seem to amplify the psychological workings of people rather than to describe places or objects. Thus the parenthetical expressions can be taken to reveal the inner selves of the women and men...in the second stanza, the inner workings of the children in the third stanza...the inner workings of everyones and someones in the fifth stanza...the inner workings again of the children's minds in the sixth stanza...the inner workings of noone in the seventh stanza...and the inner workings again of the women and men in the ninth stanza...--this last by metonymy.

The parentheses...then, seem always to function as interpolations within the narrative material, and to bear upon some psychological activity. On this basis I infer that the second line, enclosed in parentheses, may be taken to describe the inner state of "anyone" rather than the characteristics of how town.