This essay discusses developments in contemporary French poetic practice which, it argues, cohere around a preoccupation with the evolving character of the real as the object of cognition and symbolic practice. This evolution, linked to changes in the built and digital landscapes, has the urban as its privileged theatre. But this relevance of the urban space is manifested just as much by a crisis of urban representation – one to which the fluid parameters of poetic practice and creation are particularly attuned – as it is of a stably represented and representable reality. The essay engages with the problematics of cognitive mapping (Jameson) as a way of framing the problem for poetic practice, revisiting the origins of that theoretical metaphor in behavioural science (Tolman), before briefly exploring a series of broadly poetic responses (Alféri, Tarkos, Pennequin, Quintane), approached through their self-conceptualisations as poetic dispositifs, to the complexities of uttering the urban real.