of the night, the structure assures that the audience gets to choose from whom they will hear more poetry. Audience members furthermore become part of each poem's presence, thus breaking down the barriers between poet/performer, critic, and audience. Bob Holman, a poetry activist and former slammaster of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, once called the movement "the democratization of verse". In 2005, Holman was also quoted as saying: "The spoken word revolution is led a lot by women and by poets of color. It gives a depth to the nation's dialogue that you don't hear on the floor of Congress. I want a floor of Congress to look more like a National Poetry Slam. That would make me happy." Criticism At the 1993 National Poetry Slam in San Francisco, a participating team from Canada (Kedrick James, Alex Ferguson and John Sobol) wrote, printed and circulated an instant broadside titled Like Lambs to the Slammer, that criticized what they perceived as the complacency, conformity, and calculated tear-jerking endemic to the poetry slam scene. Over time, slam poetry has been criticized for lacking depth and for its features, i.e., "slam voice," which may limit the range of emotion it can express. In an interview in the Paris Review, literary critic Harold Bloom wrote I can't bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn't even silly; it is the death of art. Poet and lead singer of King Missile, John S. Hall, has also long been a vocal opponent, taking issue with such factors as its inherently competitive nature and what he considers its lack of stylistic diversity. He recalls seeing his first slam, at the Nuyorican Poets Café: "...I hated it. And it made me really uncomfortable and ... it was very much like a sport, and I was interested in poetry in large part because it was like the antithesis of sports. ... [I]t seemed to me like a very macho, masculine form of poetry and not at all what I was interested in." The poet Tim Clare offers a "for and against" account of the phenomenon in Slam: A Poetic Dialogue. Ironically, slam poetry movement founder